Visiting Scholars Program, 2006-2007
Chair of the Visiting Scholars Program
Patricia Meyer Spacks – President of the Academy, 2001 - 2006. Edgar F. Shannon Professor
of English Emerita, University of Virginia. B.A., Rollins College. M.A., Yale University.
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley. A renowned scholar of eighteenth-century
literature and culture whose work encompasses issues of identity and selfhood, privacy,
gossip, and feminism. Her most recent work is Novel Beginnings: Experiments in
Eighteenth-Century English Fiction, an account of the diverse forms and themes that
contributed to the development of the eighteenth-century novel.
2006-2007 Scholars
Victoria Cain – Ph.D., Columbia University. B.A., Harvard University. Selling Nature:
America's Natural History Museums, 1869-1942. An analysis of how the rise of consumer
capitalism and new forms of exhibits deepened the schism between research scientists and
those engaged in the popular study of nature and redefined the American approach to the
natural world.
M. Taylor Fravel – Assistant Professor of Political Science, M.I.T. Ph.D., Stanford
University. B.A., Middlebury College. The Long March to Peace—China's Settlement of
Territorial Disputes. An exploration of why and how China has settled its territorial
disputes since the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, demonstrating that
leaders are more likely to compromise when confronted by internal threats to regime
security, including rebellions and legitimacy crises, and suggesting that domestic conflicts
often create incentives for cooperation.
Ajay Mehrotra – Associate Professor of Law and of History, Indiana University School of Law.
Ph.D., University of Chicago. J.D., Georgetown University. B.A., University of Michigan.
Sharing the Burden: Law, Politics, and the Making of the American Fiscal State: 1880-
1930. An investigation of the transformation of U.S. public finance from a system of
regressive indirect national taxes to a progressive income tax regime guided not only by the
need for greater revenue but also by concerns for equity and social justice.
Anthony Mora – Assistant Professor of History, Texas A&M University. Ph.D., University of
Notre Dame. B.A., University of New Mexico. Race Rivals: African-Americans, Mexican-
Americans, and Ideologies of Racial Difference, 1890-1940. An attempt to shift historical
studies of race away from the "white" and "other" dichotomy by examining the relationship
between these two groups in Chicago, where they lived in close proximity to each other and
created their own understanding of race in America.
Bethany Moreton – Ph.D., Yale University. B.A., Williams College. Wal-Mart World: The
Globalization of the Sunbelt Service Economy. An examination of how Wal-Mart and its
philanthropic foundations harnessed evangelical Christianity to foster trust in corporate
actors and the free market.
Laura Scales - Ph.D., Harvard University. B.A., Yale University. Speaking in Tongues:
Mediumship and American Narrative Voice. A study of the influence of prophets, spiritual
mediums, and psychics on ideas of narrative personhood in the works of Stowe, Hawthorne,
James, Hopkins, Faulkner and other writers from the Second Great Awakening to the
modernist movement.
Anne Stiles - Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles; B.A. Harvard University.
Neurological Fictions: Brain Science, and Literary History, 1865-1905. A consideration
of the complex relationship between neurology and literature at the fin de siecle when such
scientifically trained novelists as Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Silas Weir Mitchell,
and H.G. Wells intervened in controversies spawned by late Victorian neurology and
actively shaped public opinion about neurological innovations.
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