Faculty Fellowship

Description of 2015-16 Workshop on the HISTORY OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM (immediately below).
Description of, and application for, 2016-17 Workshop on IMAGINING HISTORY, DOING POLITICS (scroll down).

2015-16 Warren Center Faculty Fellowship on the HISTORY OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM. The goal of this workshop, being led by Sven Beckert (History), Christine Desan (Law), Kenneth Mack (Law), and Michael Zakim (Tel Aviv University), is to encourage and further advance the project of rewriting the history of the American economy. We propose to build on the growing scholarly interest in political economy and the history of capitalism while at once broadening its scope and creating a cross-disciplinary endeavor that embraces the sociology of knowledge, the study of technology and material culture, changing paradigms of political authority, the re-organization of family life, the invention of the modern private subject, and the birth of liberal ideology. We shall accordingly seek to include in the ranks of our fellows and guest lecturers scholars from such diverse fields as anthropology, business, engineering, law, political philosophy, and, yes, economics.

This attempt to “bring the economy back” into social and political history replaces the cliometric-driven genre of “economic history” that once enjoyed near-exclusive franchise over the study of society’s tumultuous experience of wealth, property, markets, abundance, and scarcity. At the same time, we aspire to generate a conversation between other fields of inquiry that have also addressed these questions, whether labor histories of class, business histories of the firm, legal histories of property, intellectual histories of economic thought, institutional histories of the state, or political histories of liberal governance. Our goal is to encourage scholars to transcend such traditional categories in order to begin building the foundations of a new synthesis for understanding the workings of capital and its historical transformation into capitalism.

Such a history of the economy also contravenes orthodox periodizations and common spatial boundaries. And so, in addition to its multi-disciplinary nature, ours is also a multi-national project. That is to say, the development of America’s national economic system unfolded – and continues to unfold – within an insistently global context, whether in terms of disciplinary theory, government policy, the circulation of goods and credit, or the division of labor. Such an expanded perspective informed by world history is integral to understanding the national experience and will likewise be an important emphasis of our seminar.

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The 2016-17 Warren Center Faculty Fellowship will be on the theme Imagining History, Doing Politics: The Uses and Disadvantages of the Past, led by Kirsten Weld (History) and Brandon Terry (African and African American Studies).

The Charles Warren Center for American History at Harvard University invites fellowship applications for the 2016-2017 seminar “Imagining History, Doing Politics: The Uses and Disadvantages of the Past.” We seek scholars investigating how diverse invocations and imaginings of the historical past have provided the foundation for political thought and action in an array of hemispheric settings. Our aim is to explore how political actors and intellectuals recover and construct the past in order to understand political problems in the present and envision possible futures, while also considering the ethical, aesthetic, epistemological, and, above all, political questions raised by such marshalings of historical narratives. Scholars from the humanities and social sciences working on all periods of history in the Americas are invited to apply.

People look to history as they participate in politics; we recover the past in order to makes sense of the present and look toward the future. Indeed, divergent interpretations of history comprise much of the stuff of everyday political contestation, not least because the adjudication of history has serious consequences for polities and social movements the world over. Such consequences include, but are not limited to the payment of reparations, the offering of official apologies following atrocities, the settlement of land claims, judgments about the exemplarity of particular historical moments or actors, and the integrity of local, national, and other identities—in short, some of the most pressing and divisive questions in the political sphere.

From debates over the legacies of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, to the ongoing litigation of Cold War violence in Latin America, it is clear that whether explicitly or implicitly, whether knowingly or unwittingly, political actors locate themselves in time as they frame their aspirations and formulate their plans. In order to do so, they rely upon both the material record of the past (archives, oral and artistic traditions, embodied practices, etc.) and a set of ideational strategies or modes of narration (romantic, tragic, ironic, picaresque). Their picking, sorting, and re-working remakes the past in the image of its imagined future, whether in the courtroom or on the streets. Politics is always about historical judgment and temporal sensibilities.

Fellows will present their work in a seminar led by Brandon M. Terry (African and African American Studies/Social Studies) and Kirsten Weld (History).
This seminar will examine how diverse invocations and imaginings of the historical past have provided the foundation for political thought and action in an array of hemispheric settings. Convened by an historian whose primary interest is in Latin America and a political theorist centrally concerned with African American history and black politics, seminar participants will investigate the politics of historical imagination in the Americas, exploring the thorny territory where history and memory meet in the service of social mobilization and political judgment. Recent scholarship that has engaged these questions includes Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes; Ari Kelman’s A Misplaced Massacre; Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past; Kirsten Weld’s Paper Cadavers; Steve J. Stern’s Battling for Hearts and Minds; John and Jean Comaroff’s Theory from the South; David Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity; David Blight’s American Oracle; Robert Gooding-Williams’ In the Shadow of DuBois; Meili Steele’s Hiding from History; and Romand Cole et. al.’s Radical Future Pasts. Further work remains to be done in these directions, particularly as concerns the relationship between historiography and political theory, transnational connections, the analysis of social movements, and the memory of social movements, at all points along the ideological spectrum. This seminar will bring together interdisciplinary scholars whose work focuses on the processes by which historical actors (radical and reactionary, activist and jurist, visionary and foot soldier) use the past to make sense of the present and the future, and on the hold that the past exerts over its own future.

The application deadline is December 15, 2015.
The deadline for recommendation letters is January 15, 2016.