Visiting Scholars Program, 2008-2009

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; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley; M.A., Yale University; B.A., Rollins College. 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.

2008-2009 Scholars

Daniel Foster – Assistant Professor of Theater Studies, Duke University. Ph.D., University of Chicago; B.A., St. Johns College. Field: Comparative Literature. The Transatlantic Minstrel Show: British Romanticism and American Blackface. A history of blackface minstrels as a movement bringing together scholarship and art, parody and emulation, social misfits and social reformers, black and white, England and America.

Louis Hyman – Ph.D., Harvard University; B.A., Columbia University. Field: History.Debtor Nation: How Consumer Credit Built Postwar America. An analysis of the political and economic institutions, consumer behaviors, and legal framework that converged, by the 1970s and 1980s, to bring about a major personal debt crisis with deep implications for American society.

Rocío Magaña – Ph.D., University of Chicago; B.A., California State University, Fresno. Field: Anthropology. Bodies on the Line: Life, Death, and Authority on the Arizona-Mexican Border. An examination of the complex social, economic, moral, and political space that constitutes the U.S.-Mexico border and the tension among securing the border, procuring the safety of those who try to cross it illegally, and managing the bodies of those who die in the attempt.

Erez Manela – Associate Professor of American History, Harvard University. Ph.D., Yale University; B.A., Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Field: History. The Eradication of Smallpox: An International History. A study of the World Health Organization’s Global Smallpox Eradication Program that provides insight into the history of the Cold War, postcolonial international relations, the role of transnational organizations in globalization, and the development of modern medicine and international public health. (SPRING 2009)

Michael Pasquier – Ph.D., Florida State University; B.A., Louisiana State University. Field: Religion. Catholic Creole Frontier: Religion and Colonialism in the Lower Mississippi Valley. An analysis of religion in the frontier society of the Lower Mississippi Valley, illustrating the impotence of state-sponsored Roman Catholic officials in controlling the religious beliefs and practices of European missionaries and settlers, displaced Native Americans, and free and enslaved persons of African descent.

David Singer – Assistant Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ph.D., Harvard University; B.A., University of Michigan. Field: Political Science. International Finance within Families: Migrant Remittances in the Global Economy. An examination of migrant remittances that will contribute to our understanding of the financial implications of immigration, the influence of global capital flows on government policymaking, and the dilemmas facing U.S. policymakers as they consider immigration policy, foreign aid, and financial deregulation.

Victoria Solan – Ph.D., Yale University; B.A., Oberlin College. Field: Art History. Healthy Design: Modernist Architecture in Los Angeles in the 1920s. An examination of health and the American house within the context of twentieth-century California architecture, focusing on the persistence of seemingly anti-modern, folkloric or homeopathic elements among proponents of some of the most technologically advanced and aesthetically forward-looking design in America.

Thomas Stapleford – Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts, Notre Dame University. Ph.D., Harvard University; B.A., University of Delaware. Field: History of Science. Home and Market: Women, Economics, and the Study of Consumption, 1910-1960. An exploration of the discipline of home economics in universities and government agencies, focusing on the work of female social scientists and their influence on the understanding of modern consumption.

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