| Exploring American Democracy, U.Va.

Rachel Heise Bolten is a graduate student in the Department of English at Stanford University, focusing on nineteenth and twentieth century American literature and culture.

She received her MPhil in Criticism & Culture from Cambridge University in 2013, where she was a Gates Scholar. She is interested in ways of seeing, in the intersections of subjective and objective, word and image, nation, and democracy, and the relationship between aesthetic and political representation. As such she has written about a wide variety of objects, including colonial weather diaries, literary naturalism, the Hollywood musical, George R. Stewart’s history of American place-names Names on the Land, and, towards more sustained projects, British Mass-Observation, the Depression-era Federal Writers’ Project, and the panorama.

Leslie Butler is an associate professor in the History department at Dartmouth College, where she teaches a variety of courses in American intellectual and cultural history.

Her first book (Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform) examined the reform efforts of a group of nineteenth-century British and American intellectuals. She is currently at work on a book that explores the conceptual intersection of what contemporaries labeled the “woman question” with debates over democracy across the nineteenth century. Focusing on the broad discussion found in periodicals, foreign commentary, etiquette manuals, religious sermons, novels, poetry, congressional debates, and personal correspondence, American Democracy and the ‘Woman Question,’ 1830-1880 examines democratic aspirations and anxieties during a pivotal half century. She lives in Hanover, NH with her husband and three sons.

Constance DeVereaux is a cultural policy scholar and Director of the LEAP Institute for the Arts at Colorado State University. She received an interfiled PhD in philosophy and political science from Claremont Graduate University and an MFA in fiction and creative non-fiction from Antioch University, Los Angeles.

From 2006-2012 and 2015– present she served as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in American Studies, with specialties in cultural policy and cultural management. Her research interests include cultural citizenship, the use of narrative in cultural policy analysis, and early American attitudes about the arts. The latter interest has led to investigation of authors such as Alexis de Tocqueville and other 19th century European chroniclers of American life. Her recent publications include Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World (co-authored with Martin Griffin), “Is Art a Fruit or a Vegetable: Toward a Practice-Based Definition of Art,” and the forthcoming “Chagrin and the Politics of American Aesthetics.”

Robin E. Field is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. She is co-editor of Transforming Diaspora: Communities beyond National Boundaries (2011) and Associate Editor of South Asian Review. She has published articles on Jhumpa Lahiri, Sandra Cisneros, Alice Walker, Jana Monji, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz.

Raymond Hain is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. His research centers on Aristotelian ethics and the history of ethics, as well as applied ethics (including the ethics of architecture). He is currently working on an Aristotelian form of discourse ethics.

Trevor Latimer is currently a scholar-in-residence in the Department of Political Science at the University of Georgia. In 2016-2017, he will be a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Political Economy Project at Dartmouth College. He received his Ph.D in Politics from Princeton University in 2015. His research interests include American political thought, contemporary democratic theory, the history of political thought, and the localist tradition in the United States. His work has appeared in the European Journal of Political Theory.

Patrick Neal is Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont, where he teaches in the area of political theory. His primary interests are the tradition of modern liberalism and its critics from both the right and left, and the relations between religion and politics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1985.

Jean Elisabeth Pedersen is Associate Professor of History in the Eastman School of Music and the College of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of Rochester.

She is the author of Legislating the French Family: Feminism, Theater, and Republican Politics, 1870-1920 (Rutgers University Press, 2003); and the editor of “War, Occupation, and Empire in France and Germany,” a special issue of Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques (vol. 40, no. 1, Spring 2014). Her articles and essays on topics as various as French feminism, French cultural studies, the history of the French social sciences, and the power of gender in French learned culture have appeared in a list of journals that includes French Historical Studies (1996, 2014); Gender and History (2004, 2014); The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (1998); and SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (2001); and also in a range of edited collections that includes Domesticating the Empire, ed. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (University Press of Virginia, 1998); French Cultural Studies, ed. Marie-Pierre LeHir and Dana Strand (State University of New York Press, 2000); Teaching Durkheim, ed. Terry Godlove (Oxford University Press, 2005); Le pouvoir du genre: Laïcités et religions 1905-2005, ed. Florence Rochefort (Presses universitaires du Mirail, 2007); and Les féministes de la première vague, ed. Christine Bard (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015). She teaches French history, European history, comparative American and European history, and international human rights; and she is currently working on a book about the history of men and women as public intellectuals and political activists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France.

(photo credit: Gerry Szymanski)

Greg Robinson is Professor of History at l'Université du Québec À Montréal, a French-language institution in Montreal, Canada, and a researcher there at the Center for United States Studies of the Chaire Raoul-Dandurand.

A specialist in North American Ethnic Studies and U.S. Political History, he is the author of By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Harvard University Press, 2001), which uncovers President Franklin Roosevelt’s troubling racial views, and explores his central involvement in the wartime confinement of 120,000 Japanese Americans; A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (Columbia University Press, 2009), which studies Japanese American and Japanese Canadian confinement together in a transnational context; and After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics (University of California Press, 2012), which centers on post war resettlement and coalitions for civil rights between Japanese Americans and other minorities. His most recent book, The Great Unknown: Japan's American Sketches, offers an alternative history of Japanese Americans. He writes a regular column, “The Great Unknown and the Unknown Great,” for the San Francisco Nichi Bei Weekly. He is an editorial board member and Forward section editor of the Journal of Transnational American Studies.

(photo credit: UQÀM/Émilie Tournevache)

Zachary M. Schrag is a professor of history at George Mason University. He is the author of two books, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro, and Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009, both of them published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Schrag’s current project, The Battle of Philadelphia: Irish Immigrants, Angry Mobs, Armed Volunteers, and the “Awful Riots” of 1844, will tell the story of one of the worst of the many sequences of civil disorder in antebellum America. In May and July of that year, nativist mobs attacked Catholic churches, leading to extended street battles among nativists, Irish Catholics, and volunteer militia. The events of 1844 constitute a tangled mess of claims about the meaning of democracy. Along with various militia units, newspapers, political parties, religious denominations, advocacy clubs, and benevolent organizations all spoke for overlapping groups of Philadelphians. Some claimed to represent majority opinion, while others appealed for minority rights. Schrag hopes that Democracy in America will help him make sense of it all.

Exploring American Democracy

with Alexis de Tocqueville as Guide

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