Visiting Scholars Program, 2009-2010
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 scholar of eighteenth-century
literature, she has also written on such cultural issues as privacy, gossip, and
feminism. Her most recent work is Reading Eighteenth-Century Poetry, an investigation
of thematic and formal diversity and continuity in the period's verse.
2009-2010 Scholars
Scholars
Daniel Amsterdam – Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania; B.A., Yale
University. Field: History. The Roaring Metropolis: Business, Civic Welfare,
and State Expansion in 1920s America. A study recasting the 1920s as a moment
of aggressive governmental expansion that hinges primarily on the interrogation
of urban politics, corporate political activism and the introduction of a new analytic
framework, the civic welfare state.
Deborah Becher – Ph.D., Princeton University; B.A., University
of Virginia. Field: Sociology. Valuing Property: Eminent Domain for Private Redevelopment,
Philadelphia 1992-2007. A study of Philadelphia’s recent use of eminent domain,
revealing how difficult decisions about economic management are made, challenging
existing notions of what citizens expect from government, and exploring the tensions
between the public and private dimensions of property.
Angus Burgin – Ph.D., Harvard University; A.B., Harvard University.
Field: History. The Return of Laissez-Faire. A transatlantic history of free-market
ideas and the institutions that supported them, focusing on the economists in the
decades following the onset of the Great Depression who helped to create a theoretical
framework for the revival of conservatism in American politics.
Dawn Coleman – Assistant Professor of English, University of Tennessee.
Ph.D., Stanford University; M.T.S., Harvard Divinity School; B.A., University of
California, Los Angeles. Preaching and the Rise of the American
Novel. A project on the intersection of Protestant preaching and literary
culture in the nineteenth century, considering a range of antebellum authors who
sought to capture for novels the spiritual authority of the pulpit.
Jason Petrulis – Ph.D., Columbia University; A.B., Harvard University.
Field: US History. Marketing the American Way, 1932-1950. An examination of how
the U.S. government policy intersected with corporate marketing to mobilize Americans
for World War II and the early Cold War through “idea advertising,” a process that
used marketing techniques to sell ideas about companies, people, and even nations.
Jamie Pietruska – Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology;
A.B., Brown University. Field: History. Propheteering: A Cultural History of Prediction
in the Gilded Age. An analysis of changing practices and perceptions of prediction
in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, including weather prediction,
agricultural forecasting, fortune-telling and spiritualism, and utopian literature.
Associate Scholars
Crystal Feimster – Assistant Professor of History, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ph.D., Princeton University; B.A., University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Sexual Warfare: Rape and the American
Civil War. A study describing how sexual violence during the Civil War and
the decades that followed went beyond the immediate effects of the physical attack
and had long-lasting political and social consequences. (FALL, 2009)
Andrew Jewett – Assistant Professor of History and Social Studies,
Harvard University. Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley; B.A., University
of California, Berkeley. Against the Technostructure: Critics of
Scientism since the New Deal. An exploration of the political meanings attributed
to science by mid-twentieth-century critics of American liberalism.
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