Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Presidential History and More at the Miller Center This Fall

The Miller Center for Public Affairs is out with its Fall 2012 schedule of events, some of which are of special interest to legal historians.  These include a meeting of the Governing America in a Global Era Colloquium by Sophia Lee, Penn Law, on Friday, December 7, from 12:30-2:00 p.m.   (I’m assuming that, as in previous years, the GAGE Collquium will be webcast live.)  Lee's paper, A "Commitment to Strict Construction" addresses “how the conservative workplace Constitution divides the New Right coalition.”

Of even more interest is what looks to be a world-class state-of-the-field conference on presidential history, Recasting Presidential History, to be held October 26-27, 2012:
“Recasting Presidential History” seeks to jump start a new generation of scholarship about the presidency that capitalizes on key insights of leading scholars, many of whom have not concentrated on the presidency. Path breaking work in subdisciplines ranging from cultural to social history have created new frameworks that can inform and enrich work on the presidency. It has already begun to do so in the case of senior scholars who have ventured into presidential history after making a name for themselves in fields as disparate as intellectual and social history.

This conference seeks to galvanize interest in the presidency and extend it from presidential historians and senior scholars to a broader range of historians just embarking on their careers. By pointing to the rich opportunities for a conversation between political history that features the history of presidents and some of the most fruitful trends in historical scholarship over the past generation, and by engaging some of the leading social scientists who concentrate on the presidency as well as public intellectuals who have crafted highly successful accounts of presidents, we hope to foster a new generation of scholars to pursue of variety of analytical approaches to studying the American presidency.

This particular initiative comes at a time that political history, in general, is experiencing a renewal and at a historical moment when the influence of the contemporary presidency has made a deep impression on the current generation of scholars. In short, this is a propitious time for historians of all stripes to “bring the president back in.” We are pleased that the panel focused on the Presidency and the World will be this year’s Ambassador William C. Battle Symposium on American Diplomacy. The conference is sponsored by the Miller Center, with support from the American Political History Institute at Boston University.
[Program after the jump.]
The State of the Field
Chair, Steve Gillon, University of Oklahoma
Comment, Ira Katznelson, Columbia University
Paper, Bruce Schulman, Boston University
Paper, Stephen Skowronek, Yale University

Presidents and the Political Structure
Chair, Sidney Milkis, University of Virginia
Comment, William Galston, Brookings Institution
Paper, Gareth Davies, University of Oxford
Paper, Daniel Galvin, Northwestern University

Presidents and the Economy
Chair, TBD
Comment, Jacob Hacker, Yale University
Paper, Michael Bernstein, Tulane University
Paper, Cathie Jo Martin, Boston University

Presidents in the World
Chair, Emily Rosenberg, UC Irvine
Comment, Melvyn Leffler, University of Virginia
Paper, Frank Costigliola, University of Connecticut
Paper, William Hitchcock, University of Virginia

Presidents and the Social Structure
Chair, John Judis, The New Republic
Comment, Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University
Paper, Alice O’Connor, UC Santa Barbara
Paper, Thomas Sugrue, University of Pennsylvania

Presidents and Political Culture
Chair, James Kloppenberg, Harvard University
Comment, Daniel Rodgers, Princeton University
Paper, Grace Elizabeth Hale, University of Virginia
Paper, Robert Self, Brown University

Presidents and the Media
Chair, Allison Silver, Politico
Comment, Michael Schudson, Columbia University
Paper, Susan Douglas, University of Michigan
Paper, David Greenberg, Rutgers University