Fields of Interest:
My scholarly concerns--at their broadest--lie in the study of Western modernity, that is, the course of European and American history since the seventeenth century. But my principal research interest for some years has been in American political culture. Underlying much of my work here is a concern with the relationships among democratic ideals, liberal theory, and practical politics. As an intellectual historian of this theme, I have focused on the history of philosophical pragmatism, publishing an intellectual biography of John Dewey, as well as Democratic Hope, a study of the political implications of pragmatism and neo-pragmatism. As a cultural historian of liberal democracy, my published work has centered on popular political theory and the social history of the American moral imagination--evident, I claim, in documents such as Betty Grable pin-ups and Norman Rockwell paintings. Much of my writing here has centered on World War II, about which I have written one book and am finishing another.
As this summary suggests, I am not at all uneasy about moving back and forth across the supposed divides between high and popular culture, between intellectual and cultural history. This indifference to such roadblocks is reflected in the courses I teach, as well as my writing. These diverse interests are reflected as well in the dissertations I have advised. My transnational interests are reflected in writing and teaching I do on modern American foreign policy and on modern European intellectual and cultural history.
One of the things I value most in the traditions of the history department here at the University of Rochester is the commitment to extending the public sphere in which historians practice their craft beyond the confines of a narrowly circumscribed professional and academic realm. History here has long been a form of social and cultural criticism. My own interventions in matters of overt public moment have of late been concentrated in the pages of The Christian Century, Raritan, and Bookforum.
Daniel Borus and I recently launched the Albion Tourgee Seminar in American Cultural History, which provides a forum for the work of local historians in our field. We would extend an invitation to join us in the seminar to all those historians of the United States in Rochester and its environs who might be interested.
Graduate Fields:
I offer the following fields for the PhD qualifying examination. For explanations of fields, see the "Graduate Overview" page in the Graduate Handbook.
Teaching Field:
Modern United States (US II)
Research Fields:
American Cultural History (American History)
American Intellectual History (American History)
America and the World Since 1865 (Transnational)
Modernity and Modernism (Transnational)
I will not be accepting students for admission in Fall 2014.
Courses Offered:
- HIS 100: Gateway to History: America and the Holocaust
- HIS 148: Recent America, 1929-Present
- HIS 234: Twentieth-Century European Thought
- HIS 265: America and the "Good War"
- HIS 267: American Thought 1600-1865
- HIS 268: American Thought, 1865-1990
- HIS 298: Music-Made America: Bruce Springsteen
- HIS 308/408: Modernity and Modernism
- HIS 334W/434: America and the World II (1865-Present)
- HIS 337W/437: American Culture in the Great Depression and WWII
- HIS 511: Readings in Nineteenth-Century American Intellectual History
- HIS 512: Research in American Intellectual History
Representative Publications:
- John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Amazon»
- In Face of the Facts: Moral Inquiry in American Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Amazon»
- Why We Fought: Forging American Obligations in World War II (Washington: Smithsonian Press, 2004). Amazon»
- Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). Amazon»
- "History and Moral Inquiry," Modern Intellectual History, 9 (2012): 389-408.
- "Just Gimme Some Truth: A Pragmatist Proposal" in Jeremy Elkins and Andrew Norris, eds., Truth and Democratic Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
- "The Liberal Agony," Christian Century (20 September 2011): 22-31.
- "Isolationism Reconsidered, " Raritan 30 (2010): 4-36.
- "Bourne Over Baghdad," Raritan 27 (2007): 104-117.
- Some of my unpublished work can be found at UR Research.
