Visiting Scholars Program, 2003-2004

Chair of the Visiting Scholars Program

James Carroll – Historian and columnist for The Boston Globe. Books include An American Requiem, Constantine’s Sword, the Church and the Jews: A History, and, most recently, Toward a New Catholic Church . During his tenure at the program, he will be working on a history of the Pentagon.

Scholars

Eileen Babbitt – Assistant Professor of International Politics, Fletcher School, Tufts University. Refugee Repatriation After Civil War: The Tension Between Coercion and Trust . An examination of whether coercive laws and structure are the only way to keep "enemies" together when refugees return and try to reintegrate into communities where they are not welcome, and whether this coercive strategy leads to voluntary coexistence or undermines peace building efforts.

Robert Chodat – Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford University. The Pattern of Persons: Ideas of Agency in American Literature and Philosophy. A study of meaning and action in twentieth-century American literature and philosophy, focusing on how certain narrative texts from Gertrude Stein, Don DeLillo, Saul Bellow, and others articulate competing pictures of mind, intention, and personhood.

Crystal Feimster – Assistant Professor of African-American History, Boston College. Lynching Women: Racial and Sexual Violence in the American South. An analysis of the varied roles played by black and white women in the history of lynching in the southern regions of the United States.

Jonathan Hansen – Postdoctoral Scholar, Boston University. Apostate's Return: American Expatriates and the Dilemmas of National and Ethnic Identity. An exploration of the cultural criticism of twentieth-century American expatriates whose return home reveals the ineluctable grip of national allegiance on twentieth-century selfhood while providing a fresh perspective on American national identity.

Matthew Lindsay – J.D. Yale Law School, PhD candidate, University of Chicago. Equal Protection in the Age of "Ethnicity"—Racial Equality and the "Colorblind" Constitution Since the Second Reconstruction. A historical analysis of the constriction of citizenship rights post-Reconstruction, leading to insight into the retrenchment of anti-discrimination law since 1970.

Ann Mikkelsen – Lecturer in the Department of History and Literature, Harvard University. Voices from the Field: Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry. A project on twentieth-century poets who called attention to social, economic, and political inequities and attempted to reconcile these with their own relatively privileged, but simultaneously marginal, status as representative voices of a democratic society.

Adam Webb – Postdoctoral Scholar, Princeton University. A World, Not a Globe: Towards an Alternative Vision of Intercivilizational Dialogue and Political Cosmopolitanism. An exploration of encounters among the major pre-modern civilizations, and the lessons they provide for an ethically richer view of cross-cultural collaboration and a future world order.