Joint University of Wisconsin and University of Chicago Workshop: "Globalizing Political History"

Date:  November 17, 2006 Time:  8:30 AM - 5:30 PM Location:  The Pyle Center, 702 Langdon Street; Check electronic message board under "Globalizing Political History" for exact room location. Phone:  (608) 265-8038 Email:  fredericks@wisc.edu Contact:  Trudy Fredericks Sponsor:  UW-Madison Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy (WAGE) and The Center for the Humanities with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Co-Sponsor:  History Department and the Interdisciplinary Workshop on American Political History at the University of Chicago, UW-Madison Division of International Studies, Global Security Initiative and UW Department of History Cost:  Free, and open to the public.

In recent years historians have broadened the conceptual and empirical parameters of political history. They have looked to incorporate new institutional, legal, social, and cultural perspectives in their analyses of power. They have also pushed the boundaries of the state to include international and non-state actors. Fundamentally, this new research has globalized the field and has re-shaped our understanding of the last century. State leaders remain important historical actors, but they now share center stage in narratives of change with many other voices. The promise and challenge of a new global political history is to re-think the nature of power in society, synthesizing various perspectives and approaches.

This collaborative workshop between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Chicago will showcase a diverse range of scholarship that contributes to a growing dialogue about globalizing political history. Graduate students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Chicago Departments of History will present conceptually creative and empirically rigorous draft papers. This is an informal forum for graduate students and faculty from our two institutions to share their work and learn from one another. We hope to build a vibrant cross-institutional collaborative culture, and, if possible, make this an annual event. The workshop will include panels of paper presenters and a round-table discussion.  Graduate students and faculty from all disciplines are encouraged to attend and participate in this event.

To view the event program, please click here.

PROGRAM

8:30	Registration, Breakfast available
8:45	Opening remarks by Jeremi Suri, James Sparrow, and Prasenjit Duara
9:00	Panel 1: Culture and Society in the Cold War William Novak, Chair Jeremi Suri, Commentator Sam Lebovic Julie Lane Peter Simons Michael H. Carriere
10:30	Break

10:45	Panel 2: Cold War Flashpoints in Latin America and Vietnam Steve Stern, Chair James Sparrow, Commentator Patrick Iber Heather Stur Vanessa Walker
12:15	Lunch
1:15	Panel 3: American State Building After Word War II Jonathan Zeitlin, Chair Elisabeth Clemens, Commentator Grant Madsen Stephen R. Porter Christine Lamberson
2:45	Break

3:15	Panel 4: Imperial Practices Prasenjit Duara, Chair John Cooper, Commentator Joshua Gedacht Jaime-Alexis Fowler Deborah Meiners
5:00	Concluding Remarks, Reflections

PANELISTS

University of Chicago Graduate Students

Michael H. Carriere
Rethinking the 1960s (Yet Again): Viewing the International Student Protest Movement through the Lens of Globalization, and Vice Versa
Michael H. Carriere is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago.  His dissertation, "Between Being and Becoming: On Architecture, Student Protest, and the Aesthetics of Liberalism," seeks to explore the relationship between issues of space and political philosophy in postwar America.

Patrick Iber
CIA by Day, Castro by Night: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Cuban Revolution
Patrick Iber is a Ph.D. student in Latin American history at the University of Chicago.  Before beginning that program, he taught in secondary schools in Texas, California, and El Salvador.

Sam Lebovic
The Creation of the Fulbright Program and the International Transmission of American Culture, 1945-1950
Sam Lebovic completed undergraduate studies at the University of Sydney, majoring in History and Government, before moving to the University of Chicago to pursue a Ph.D. in U.S. history.  His research interests include the social and political history of popular culture, American nationalism, the history of globalization, and the role of the United States in global affairs, with a particular focus on the post-World War II era.

Grant Madsen
The Funding of World War II and the Divergence of Anglo-American State Building
Grant Madsen is completing a Ph.D. in American Political and Intellectual History at the University of Chicago.  His dissertation focuses on the relationship between democratic and economic theory from the Franklin Roosevelt through the Lyndon Johnson years.

Stephen R. Porter
The Global Politics of Refugee Resettlement in the U.S. during the Early Cold War
Stephen R. Porter's dissertation examines how over two million political refugees were aided abroad, and then systematically resettled into thousands of American communities from the 1930s through the 1970s by a range of governmental and nongovernmental organizations.  He argues that the hybrid governing arrangements employed to carry out these initiatives helped to tie the consequences of domestic American social policies with America's engagement with the world.

Peter Simons
Edited Isolation: Mass Media and the Growth of Internationalism in Rural Western Michigan
Peter is a student at the University of Chicago, where he is beginning a dissertation on the growth of internationalism in the American Midwest during the 1940s.  His research interests include mass media, rural America, and cultural geography.

University of Chicago Faculty  

Elisabeth Clemens, Associate Professor of Sociology
Elisabeth Clemens, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, draws on organizational theory to address the role of social movements and voluntary organizations in processes of institutional change.  She is the author of The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and The Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890-1925 (Chicago, 1997) as well as co-editor of Private Action and the Public Good (Yale 1998) and Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology (Duke, 2005).

Prasenjit Duara, Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Prasenjit Duara is professor of History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.  He is the author of Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (1988), Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (1995), and Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (2003).  He has also edited a volume on Decolonization (Routledge, 2004) and contributed  "Transnationalism and the Challenge to National Histories," in Re-thinking American History in a Global Age, edited by Thomas Bender (2002).

William Novak, Associate Professor of History

James Sparrow, Assistant Professor of U.S. History
James T. Sparrow is assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago.  He is currently completing Americanism and Entitlement: Authorizing Big Government in an Age of Total War on the domestic social politics of the warfare state from the New Deal to the Korean War.

University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate Students

Jaime-Alexis Fowler
"Nice, generous, friendly . . . and aloof": Why the United States maintained its distance from the Rhodesian UDI, 1964-1968
Jaime-Alexis Fowler is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison particularly interested in U.S. foreign policy with Southern and Eastern Africa during the Cold War.  Before coming to Wisconsin, Jaime-Alexis worked at the Kennedy School of Government and holds a Masters in History of International Relations from the London School of Economics and a Bachelor of Arts from Vassar College.

Joshua Gedacht
The Strange Career of American Colonial Schools: Industrial Education and the Philippines
Joshua Gedacht is a second-year graduate student in Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He is broadly interested in empire and imperialism, and he is currently focusing on the intersection of politics, race, and religion in the early twentieth
century colonial schools of the Philippines and Indonesia.

Christine Lamberson
"Frightened People and Frustrated Police": Fear, Murder, and Civil Liberties in San Francisco
Christine Lamberson studies American society and culture during the Cold War, particularly the 1960s and 1970s.  She has just completed her Masters Thesis, which looks at how rising levels of violence in the United States during the 1960s and early 1970s led Americans to see this internal turmoil as the single greatest threat to Americans' security.

Julie B. Lane
The Lost World of Richard Rovere and Joe McCarthy
Julie B. Lane is a fourth-year doctoral student in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at UW-Madison.  Her focus is the relationship between journalism and politics in post-World War II America.

Deborah Meiners
Negotiating an Empire: The Peace Corps in Africa, 1961-1968
Deborah Meiners is a second-year graduate student in History at the University of Wisconsin, where her research focuses on U.S. foreign policy in Africa during the Cold War.  In addition to her historical studies, Deborah pursues interests in civil rights jurisprudence and comparative legal systems as a third-year J.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

Heather Stur
Madame Nhu, Saigon's "Flaming Feminist": Gender and U.S. Relations with the Republic of Vietnam (paper not available)
Heather Stur is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Her article, "In Service and in Protest: Black Women and the Impact of the Vietnam War on American Society," is forthcoming in Soul Soldiers: African Americans and the Vietnam Era by Stackpole Books.

Vanessa Walker
Moral Necessities and National Interests: Rethinking U.S.-Latin American Relations in a Human Rights Era
Vanessa Walker is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  She is currently working on her dissertation, which examines the relationship between human rights advocacy and diplomacy in U.S.-Latin American relations during the Carter Administration.

University of Wisconsin Faculty

Ned Blackhawk, Associate Professor of History
Ned Blackhawk teaches American Indian, U.S. Western, and early American history at Madison where he has a series of appointments in American Indian Studies, Chicano/a and Latino/a Studies, and History.  His book, Violence over the Land, was just released this fall by Harvard and examines two centuries of Indian and imperial history in the American Great Basin/Intermountain West.

John Cooper, Professor of History
John Milton Cooper, Jr. is the E. Gordon Fox Professor of American Institutions and History at the University of Wisconsin.  He is the author of numerous books, including Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Harvard University Press, 1983).  Professor Cooper is presently completing a full-scale biography of Woodrow Wilson.

Stephen Kantrowitz, Associate Professor of History
Stephen Kantrowitz, associate professor of History, specializes in the nineteenth century United States.  His research and teaching center on the ways Americans understood and experienced slavery and emancipation, especially in terms of political activity, racial ideology and gender.  He is author of Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy and is working on a study of Boston's Civil War-era black radicals and the problem of American citizenship. 

Steve J. Stern, Professor of History
Steve J. Stern teaches and researches Latin American history, from colonial times to the present.  His most recent book, Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet's Chile, 1973 (Duke U. Press, 2006), is part of a trilogy on the ways Chileans have struggled over the memory and meaning of the fall of Allende, the Pinochet dictatorship, and democratic transition in the wake of massive atrocity.

Jeremi Suri, Associate Professor of History
Jeremi Suri is an Associate Professor of History and a Senior Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy (WAGE).  He is the author of the prize-winning book, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (Harvard University Press, 2003).  He has just completed two new books: The Global Revolutions of 1968 (Norton, December 2006), and Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Harvard University Press, August 2007).

Louise Young, Professor of History and East Asian Studies
Louise Young is Professor of Japanese History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Her research interests include World War Two in Asia, comparative imperialism, and most recently, local history and urbanization.  Her book, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism, won the Arisawa and Fairbank prizes.

Jonathan Zeitlin, Professor of Sociology, Public Affairs, Political Science, and History
Jonathan Zeitlin is Director of the European Union Center of Excellence and the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy (WAGE) at UW-Madison.  His research focuses on the comparative and historical analysis of governance, business, and employment, with particular emphasis on contemporary Europe.  Among his recent publications are Local Players in Global Games: The Strategic Constitution of a Multinational Corporation (Oxford UP, 2005); Governing Work and Welfare in a New Economy: European and American Experiments (OUP, 2003); and Americanization and Its Limits: Reworking US Technology and Management in Postwar Europe and Japan (OUP, 2000).