Prof. Goldstein has retired and no longer directs BA theses or accepts new graduate students.
Columbia University, PhD '78
BIOGRAPHY
My research and teaching interests focus on the intellectual and cultural history of Europe, especially France, from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. I am particularly concerned with placing systems of thought in context—that is, situating them in relation to those social and political institutions that help to generate them and that subsequently deploy them. Much of my own work in this vein has concentrated on the psychological sciences and, hence, on the ways that sociopolitical forces unexpectedly shape our understanding and experience of our innermost selves.
After examining the formation of the nineteenth-century French psychiatric profession in Console and Classify, I turned my attention to a literal politics of selfhood. The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750-1850 traces the competition among three psychological theories—each entailing a distinctive conception of the self—for institutionalization in the state educational system: sensationalism; phrenology; and, the hands-down winner, the philosophical psychology of Victor Cousin, which featured a unified and willful moi. After completing it, I published Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy, a microhistory of a Savoyard peasant girl whose strange malady brought her to the attention of the medical community in the 1820s. I used the manuscript detailing her case for a variety of methodological purposes: to probe the relationship between text and context; to examine in concrete terms what Foucault might have meant by his claim that "sexuality" emerged as a discursive object only in the early nineteenth century; and to argue for an area of compatibility between the foucauldian and freudian interpretive perspectives.
My current research project is an effort to write what I am calling "an empirical history of moral reasoning," using as my case the rise to prominence of racial theory in France from the 1840s through the 1860s. At a time before the disastrous consequences of racial theory became known, how did the individuals involved in crafting versions of that theory conceptualize it in moral terms?
Since 1996 I have served as an editor of the Journal of Modern History. In 2013 I was elected president of the American Historical Association for 2014.
Recent Research / Recent Publications
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AHA Presidential Address: "Toward an Empirical History of Moral Thinking: The Case of Racial Theory in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France." American Historical Review 120 (2015): 1–27.
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"Neutralizing Freud: The Lycée Philosophy Class and the Problem of the Reception of Psychoanalysis in France." Critical Inquiry 40 (Autumn 2013): 40–82.
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Hysteria Complicated By Ecstasy: The Case of Nanette Leroux. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
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The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–1850. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
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Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; French translation, 1997; 2nd ed. with new afterword, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
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Foucault and the Writing of History. Blackwell, 1994.
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"Of Marx and Marksmanship: Reflections on the Linguistic Construction of Class in Some Recent Historical Scholarship." Modern Intellectual History 2 (2005): 87–107.
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"Bringing the Psyche into Scientific Focus: A Political Account." In The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 7: The Modern Social Sciences, edited by Theodore Porter and Dorothy Ross, 131–153. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
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"The Future of French History in the United States: Unapocalyptic Thoughts for the New Millennium." French Historical Studies 24, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 1–10.
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"Mutations of the Self in Old Regime and Post-Revolutionary France: From Ame to Moi to Le Moi." In Biographies of Scientific Objects, edited by Lorraine Daston, 86–116. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
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"Enthusiasm or Imagination? Eighteenth-Century Smear Words in Comparative National Context." Huntington Library Quarterly 60 (1998): 29–49.
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"Eclectic Subjectivity and the Impossibility of Female Beauty." In Picturing Science, Producing Art, edited by Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison, 360–78. Routledge, 1998.
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"Saying 'I': Victor Cousin, Caroline Angebert, and the Politics of Selfhood in Nineteenth-Century France." In Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche, edited by Michael S. Roth, 321–35, 496–99. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.
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"The Advent of Psychological Modernism in France: An Alternate Narrative." In Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, edited by Dorothy Ross, 190–209, 342–46. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
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"Foucault and the Post-Revolutionary Self: The Uses of Cousinian Pedagogy in Nineteenth-Century France." In Foucault and the Writing of History, edited by Jan Goldstein, 99–115, 276–80. Blackwell, 1994.
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"Framing Discipline with Law: Problems and Promises of the Liberal State." American Historical Review 98 (Apr. 1993): 364–75.
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"The Uses of Male Hysteria: Medical and Literary Discourse in Late Nineteenth-Century France." Representations (Spring 1991): 134–65.
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"'The Lively Sensibility of the Frenchman': Some Reflections on the Place of France in Foucault's Histoire de la folie." History of the Human Sciences 3 (1990): 333–41.
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"The Wandering Jew and the Problem of Psychiatric Anti-Semitism in Fin-de-Siècle France." Journal of Contemporary History 20 (1985): 521–52.
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"Foucault Among the Sociologists: The 'Disciplines' and the History of the Professions." History and Theory 23 (1984): 170–92.
Prof. Holt has retired and no longer directs BA theses or accepts new graduate students.
Yale University, PhD '73
BIOGRAPHY
Currently the James Westfall Thompson Professor Emeritus of American and African American History at the University of Chicago, Tom Holt has a longstanding professional interest in comparing the experiences of people in the African diaspora, particularly those in the Caribbean and the United States. His study of Jamaica's economy, politics, and society after slavery, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938, (Johns Hopkins, 1992) was awarded the 1995 Elsa Goveia Prize by the Association of Caribbean Historians. The Southern Historical Association awarded the 1978 Charles S. Sydnor Prize to Prof. Holt's previous work on the comparable period in the American South after emancipation, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Illinois, 1977).
Prof. Holt was a fellow of both the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars from 1987 to 1988. He received the Wilbur Cross Medal from Yale University in 2014 and the Presidential Initiatives Award from the University of Michigan from 1987 to 1989. From 1990 to 1995, Prof. Holt held a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and from 1995 to 1996 was a fellow in the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
Prof. Holt has been a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Southern History (1983–86), Slavery & Abolition (1986–89), and American Historical Review (1990–93). Other honors bestowed upon Prof. Holt include his election to the American Philosophical Society in 2016, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, and to the Board of Directors of the American Council of Learned Societies from January 1999 to May 2002, his appointment by President Clinton to the Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1994 to 1997, and his presidency of the American Historical Association from 1994 to 1995. Professor Holt, who holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University, has taught at Howard University, Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan.
Recent Research / Recent Publications
Prof. Holt's most recent book, The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights (Oxford, 2021), "provides an informed and nuanced understanding of the origins, character, and objectives of the mid-twentieth-century freedom struggle, privileging the aspirations and initiatives of the ordinary, grassroots people who made it. Holt conveys a sense of these developments as a social movement, one that shaped its participants even as they shaped it. He emphasizes the conditions of possibility that enabled the heroic initiatives of the common folk over those of their more celebrated leaders. This groundbreaking book reinserts the critical concept of 'movement' back into our image and understanding of the civil rights movement." The Movement is now available in French, as Le Mouvement: La lutte des Africains-Américains pour les droits civiques (La Découverte, 2021), translated by Jean-Claude Zancarini.
Children of Fire: A History of African Americans (Hill & Wang, 2010), examines the four hundred year history of African Americans in Britain's North American colonies and the United States. "[Holt] questions previous authors' attempts at pigeonholing African American history into 'neat chronological boxes,' much preferring to recount it in 'generational units' in order to reveal how lives transcend historically imposed time periods" (Kirkus Reviews). The Problem of Race in the Twenty-first Century (Harvard, 2002) draws on his thirty years of teaching and research to explore the future of race relations in America. It has foremost among its concerns "the contradictions and incoherence of a system that idealizes black celebrities in politics, popular culture, and sports even as it diminishes the average African American citizen.[...] Understanding race as ideology, he describes the processes of consumerism and commodification that have transformed, but not necessarily improved, the place of black citizens in our society."
- Discusses the 130-year anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Brazil, Cultne, Jun. 14, 2018.
- American Historical Association to offer a special session at the January 2018 meeting: "The Legacy of Thomas C. Holt's The Problem of Freedom: A 25-Year Retrospective."
- Elected to the American Philosophical Society
- Holt's Career Celebrated in a 2-Day Conference, "Marking Race, Making History"
- Awarded Wilbur Cross Medal from Yale University
- Delivers keynote address on "Slave and Citizen: Rethinking Emancipation in the Twenty-First Century" at Queen's University, Belfast [video, 57 minutes]
- Publishes Children of Fire: A History of African Americans (2011, paperback)
Stanford University, PhD '86
Prof. Borges has retired and no longer directs BA theses or accepts new graduate students.
BIOGRAPHY
Dain Borges works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American culture and ideas. His current research project, "Races, Crowds, and Souls in Brazilian Social Thought, 1880–1920," centers on the ways in which Brazilian intellectuals used race sociology and social psychology to understand popular religion and politics. He teaches seminars and courses on Latin American history, comparative nineteenth-century transformations, ideologies of national identity, and culture in the African diaspora.
Recent Research / Recent Publications
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“Mockery and Piety in Eça de Queirós and Machado de Assis.” Revista de Estudos Literários [Coimbra] (2016).
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“Catholic Vanguards in Brazil.” In Local Church, Global Church: Catholic Activism in Latin America from Rerum Novarum to Vatican II, edited by Stephen J. C. Andes and Julia G. Young. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015.
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"Healing and Mischief: Witchcraft in Brazilian Law and Literature, 1890–1922." In Crime and Punishment in Latin America, edited by Carlos Aguirre, Gilbert Joseph, and Ricardo Salvatore. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
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Esau and Jacob, by Machado de Assis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 (editor).
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"A Mirror of Progress." In The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics, edited by Robert M. Levine and John J. Crocitti. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
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"Intellectuals and the Forgetting of Slavery in Brazil." Annals of Scholarship 11 (1996).
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"The Recognition of Afro-Brazilian Symbols and Ideas, 1890–1940." Luso-Brazilian Review 32 (1995).
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"Puffy, Ugly, Slothful, and Inert: Degeneration in Brazilian Social Thought, 1880–1940." Journal of Latin American Studies 25 (1993).
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The Family in Bahia, Brazil, 1870–1945. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.
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Discusses "Natural Disasters and Social Responses" at the Summer Teacher Institute, University of Chicago [video, 50 mins]
Prof. Cook has retired and no longer directs BA theses or accepts new graduate students.
John Hopkins University, PhD '72
BIOGRAPHY
I am a specialist in early modern English and American history, with teaching interests that span the Atlantic. My research is concentrated in early American history, with a special focus in social history and a geographical focus on New England. I am especially interested in themes of community, family, rural economy and society, grassroots religion, and the social context of political behavior.
Recent Research / Recent Publications
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The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth Century New England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1976.
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Ossipee, New Hampshire, 1785–1985: A History, vol. 1. Portsmouth, NH: Peter Randall Publishers, 1989 (popular history).
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"Geography and History: Spatial Perspectives for the Study of Early America," Historical Methods 13 (1980), 19–28.
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"Local Leadership and the Typology of New England Towns, 1700– 1775," Political Science Quarterly 86 (1971), 586–608.
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"Social Behavior and Changing Values in Dedham, Massachusetts, 1770–1775," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 27 (1970), 546–80.
Prof. Bresson has retired and no longer directs BA theses or accepts new graduate students.
University of Franche-Comté, Doctorat d'Etat' 94
Recent Research / Recent Publications
- Named a 2018–19 Guggenheim Fellow
- Awarded James Breasted Prize by the AHA for The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy
- Publishes The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy: Institutions, Markets, and Growth in the City-States. Princeton University Press Translated by Steven Rendall
Prof. Alitto has retired and no longer directs BA theses or accepts new graduate students.
Harvard University, PhD '75
BIOGRAPHY
Guy Alitto has taught in all areas of Chinese studies, including the modern and classical Chinese languages and premodern history. Most of his courses, and all of his graduate courses, are in the area of modern Chinese history. His research in the last twenty years has been in modern intellectual history, local histories at the village, county, and regional levels (Zouping county in Shandong, the Wanxi area of southwestern Henan), family history (the Liangs of Guilin), and social history (Chinese banditry 1880–1950). He is especially interested in the connections between the political-social and the intellectual-cultural realms, as manifest in specific individuals and local cultures. He continues to participate in the ongoing Chinese discussion on culture and modernization through publications and lectures in the Chinese language.
Recent Research / Recent Publications
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持续焦虑： 世界范围内的饭现代化思潮 (The enduring anxiety: anti-modernization thought trends in world-wide perspective) 三联书店 （SDX Joint Publishing Company）Shanghai, 2022.
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“梁漱溟乡村建设运动的起源” (The Origins of Liang Shuming’s Rural Reconstruction Movement) 儒家文明论坛 (Confucian Civilization Forum) No. 5，Jinan, China 2019.
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“Zouping in Historical Perspective” (Chap. 2) Oi, Jean C. and Goldstein M, eds. In Zouping Revisited: Adaptive Governance in a Chinese County. Stanford, Ca. Stanford University Press, 2018.
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我所了解的梁漱溟 (What I know about Liang Shuming). In Collected Papers of the Symposium on Chinese Studies 2016. 北京，中国社会科学出版社 (China social sciences press)
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Foreign Expert, Editor 中华思想术语 (terminology dictionary for Chinese thought) Volumes 1-6 (Encyclopedic reference work of Chinese philosophical, historical and literary terms published by 外国语教育与研究出版社 (Foreign language education and research press), Beijing, 2014-2017.
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Editor, translator, contributor. Reconstituting Confucianism: Theory and Practice in the Contemporary World. Berlin: Springer, 2015.
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这个世界会好吗 Will man survive? Enlarged, annotated and illustrated edition. 三连书店 Sanlian publishers. Beijing, 2015.
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Chinese language translation by author, 最后的儒家：梁漱溟与中国现代化的两难. 大学教育与研究出版社 The last Confucian: Liang Shuming and the Dilemma of Chinese modernity (Foreign Studies University teaching and research press) Beijing. 2014.
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"汉学与世界文化的交流" (Sinology and Communications among World Culture)]. World Sinology 12 (Autumn 2013).
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"这个世界会好吗”如何完成的” (How ‘Will Man Survive?’ came about). Bishan 2 Beijing (2013).
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"Some Reflections on the Historiography of the Chinese Republican Revolution." In Lecture Series on Republic of China: A Centennial History, 176–210. Taipei: Academia Historica, 2012.
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吾曹不出如苍生何?—梁漱溟晚年口述 (If We Don’t Go Forth, What Will Happen to the People?). Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2010.
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Has Man a Future: Dialogues with the Last Confucian. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2010.
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2015 Honored for Exceptional Contributions at the Ninth China National Book Awards
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2012–13 Outstanding Chinese Documentary Film, Central China TV. As subject of Dialogues with the Last Confucian, 2012
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2012 Best Book Award, National Library of China. For 吾曹不出如苍生何? [If We Don’t Go Forth, What Will Happen to the People?]
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2011 Outstanding Contributions to Sino-Foreign Exchange, Phoenix TV Satellite Networks. For 因你中国更美丽 [You Bring Charm to China]
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2007 Ten Best Books of the Last Year, 新华网 [New China Web]. For 这个世界会好吗? [Will Man Survive?]