The American Studies Center and the Faculty of History are pleased to invite you to two talks by Prof. Steven Conn!
Urban History and the Question of Scale
Monday, May 20, 2024
1:15 PM
&
Demystifying Rural America
Tuesday, May 21, 2024
4:45 PM
Where?
May 20, 2024 (Monday, 1:15 PM)
Faculty of History (Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28, Columned Hall)
May 21, 2024 (Tuesday, 4:45 PM)
American Studies Center (Dobra 55, Room 2.118)
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)
Urban History and the Question of Scale
Urban historians take for granted that our subject is “the city”. But that then begs the question of how we define a city and what we don’t. Population? Geographic area? Economic and/or political function? Professor Conn will revisit Louis Wirth’s 1938 essay “Urbanism as a Way of Life” to make the case that urban historians need to consider questions of scale and that we might turn our attention to places usually too small to be considered cities.
Demystifying Rural America
Rural America is often characterized as in crisis or in danger of being left behind and that sense of alienation has driven the politics of rural places. Professor Conn will argue that rural Americanhas actually been at the center of modern American history, shaped by the same forces as everywhere else in the country: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and suburbanization.
Who?
Steven Conn is the W. E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Before joining the faculty at Miami he was a professor in the history department at Ohio State where he co-founded Origins and founded the Public History Initiative. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 after graduating from Yale University in 1987.
Prof. Conn is a specialist in American cultural and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th centuries, urban history and public history. He is the author of 5 books and the editor of 2 more including most recently Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the 20th Century (Oxford UP, 2014) which was named a Top Ten book for 2015 by Planetizen. He is currently working on two book projects. The first is a history of American business schools which examines their contentious relationship to the rest of higher education; the second is a study of mid-20th century liberalism and the idea of “empathy” fostered by a number of writers, academics and others.
