Areas of Specialization

The topics I cover or have experience with include the history of popular British and American religious movements, the history of pentecostalism, social and cultural theory, history of the social sciences and academic knowledge, neo-Freudianism, warfare in American society and culture, visual modernity, New York intellectuals, history of emotions, boredom, and governmentality. Within these areas, certain figures appear often in my thinking, writing, and research: William James, Ralph Ellison, Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, Bruno Latour, Guy Debord and the Situationist International, and, not least, Walter Benjamin.

Recent and Current Projects

At the moment I am editing two articles and a book manuscript. The larger manuscript, an admixture of intellectual, social, and cultural history, began as a study of social adjustment, tracing its development in early twentieth-century social science discourse to its dénouement in mid-1960s anticonformity protest. Initially, the project worked backward from the problem of World War II veteran “readjustment.” I wanted to know where the term came from, why it was used, who used it, and what were the effects of usage. The goal was to get at the cultural meanings of adjustment, particularly when the term started acquiring darker connotations of social control later in the fifties. To turn the dissertation into a book geared for a general, educated audience, I am stripping out much of what I have written on the history of social theory, turning the material into stand-alone articles: one on interwar social thought at the University of Chicago, the other on neo-Freudian influences in the social sciences. The decision has allowed me to stake larger claims as I move the manuscript forward.

The Sound of Silence: A History of Conformity

I am particularly excited about the manuscript, which I intend to complete within a year. In it, I am shifting the project away from the specificity of social adjustment toward the more general and diffuse problem of conformity. While everyone knows the stereotype of the 1950s, that of monochrome boredom, no one has written its history, that is, a history devoted entirely to conformity. This is not a book about anti-Communist fear-mongering, proliferating prefabs, and consumer gluttony, however. The book’s principal argument is that the militarization of American culture during World War II played a preponderantly direct, sustaining role in forging a postwar conformist culture. During this past year I discovered, for example, a treasure trove of War Department documents at the National Archives—testimonies from soldiers, using their own words—about the experience of adjusting to military life. The material supports my contention that the emergence of techno-bureaucratic, meritocratic ideals of efficiency and order—what would later be maligned as conformist—were not simply imposed on Americans by corporations after the war, but in more complicated ways emerged out of the war itself. Moreover, not only the War Department but also the individual soldiers themselves were invested in the ideals of togetherness and belonging. While the explicit aim of the book is to write a history of conformity, its larger, implicit goal is to help us reimagine the 1950s by reconnecting it to the experiences of the millions of men and women who supported and participated in the war.

Publishers and job search committees are free to request an annotated table of contents. Send me a message if you are.

The Great Escape

I have two articles that are close to completion, both derived from my project on social adjustment. The first is a study of neo-Freudianism and its influence in the social sciences. While a fair amount has been written on the "culture and personality" approach in anthropology, which is the clearest example of psycho-analytic-social science integration, very little has been written about the diffuse influence of neo-Freudian analysis within the social sciences, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s and outside anthropology. Using extensive research from archival holdings at the University of Chicago, as well as Karen Horney's collection at Yale University, I trace some of the earliest connections between neo-Freudian analysts and their friends and peers in the social sciences. Figures covered in article include Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Harry S. Sullivan, as well as, among others, Ernest Burgess, Robert Merton, David Riesman, Harold Lasswell, John Dollard, and Leonard Cottrell. The article argues that American social scientists essentially developed two strands of Freudianism. The one strand, which hewed closer to orthodoxy and fed mid-century existentialism, competed with a second, "neo" version that proved equally influential in social thought, particularly from World War II onward.

Deviance in the Second City

The second article looks at the development of social theory in the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on Chicago. It makes the argument that social theory took a dramatic step toward a "culturalist" direction by jettisoning evolutionary biologism. The Boasian tradition has been credited with creating the liberal ideal of "cultural relativism" in its encounter with the developing world's "Other." The lines between anthropology and sociology and social reform were far less distinct earlier in the century. Indeed, often the two disciplines were housed in the same department. This has real implications for how we imagine the history of the cultural concept. "Deviance in the Second City" argues that the concept of culture was influence equally by the far more proximate presence of the "Other" in America's urban crucibles (notably Chicago), and that appreciation for "otherness" in these booming cities was mixed with the need to create order out of chaos. Thus the distinctions that have been made between the discovery of culture as a concept and social engineering/eugenics in our histories of social thought and theory need revisiting.

The article is not simply about the Other. It is also about their observers, the social scientists, who, in their encounters with immigrants and other so-called deviants, were likewise changed. They also wanted to remake themselves. They also wanted to be, as they say, "othered." Examining both sides of this relationship, the article adds to the literature on "slumming" and suggests that today's emphasis on the promethean self has a long history, not only in modernist literature and art but in the core of the academy in social scientific thought.

“An Outdoor Mission Meeting—the Religious Plea.” Nels Anderson, The Hobo (1923) View Image

Other Articles in Preparation

In addition to these writing projects, I have written several articles that are in various states of revision:

- “Killing the Cafard: World War II, Service Personnel, and the Postwar Ethic of Leisure.”

- “The Caine Mutiny and the Politics of Cold War Conformity.”

- “Surveying the Spectacle: London Underground, 1919-1939.”

- “Sheltering the Madonna and Child: The Iconography of Britain’s WWII Blitz Experience.”