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| Tocqueville's American Studies: A Symposium |
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| Start Date: | 11/12/2009 | Start Time: | 5:00 PM |
| End Date: | 11/12/2009 | End Time: | 7:00 PM |
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Event Description
The multi-year Tocqueville Seminars project, funded by a grant from the Andrew T. Mellon Foundation, will commence with a one-day academic symposium in which three leading scholars of nineteenth-century American and European political, social, and cultural history will explore the life, works, and legacies of the famed French traveler, Alexis de Tocqueville.
Speakers
Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Associate Professor of American & Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Liberty’s Secrets: Counternarratives of Democratic Religion”
Professor Maffly-Kipp specializes in the study of African American culture during the nineteenth century, the history of immigration, ethnicity, and race, and the religious history of the American West and Pacific Rim. She is the author of Religion and Society in Frontier California (1994) and is currently completing a second book project entitled African-American Communal Narratives: Religion, Race and Memory in Nineteenth Century America. Her presentation will examine tensions between Toqueville’s desire to depict American religion as a force for political stability and countervailing religious developments during the 1830s, particularly African-American civil piety and the emergence of Mormonism, with its distinctive combination of hierarchy and individual agency.
Jennifer Pitts, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago
“Democracy and Domination: Empire, Slavery, and Democratic Corruption in Tocqueville’s Thought”
Professor Pitts has translated and edited Tocqueville’s essays on French imperial policy in Algeria and published A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (2005). A leading scholar of European political history, she is currently at work on Boundaries of the International, which explores European debates over legal relations with extra-European societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Pitts’s lecture explores connections between democracy and domination in the works of Tocqueville and his contemporaries during the 1830s and 1840s. Reflecting on the increasing propensity for violence in American public life, Tocqueville worried about the possible ill effects of universal suffrage and mass immigration, while some of his American friends insisted instead that the gravest threats to democracy came from powerful Wall Street speculators and Southern planters.
Elisa Tamarkin, Associate Professor of English, University of California at Berkeley
“Tocqueville in the Age of News”
Professor Tamarkin’s recent book, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (2008), examines Americans’ enduring fascination with British culture. Her wide ranging scholarly interests in nineteenth-century literature and intellectual history include abolitionism and antislavery, circum-Atlantic cultures, and the history of the American university. Tamarkin’s symposium presentation asks what Tocqueville can tell us about the habits of mind and economies of knowledge that the institution of the news cultivates. Drawing upon literary and visual representations of the antebellum press, and reflecting broadly on the faith in timeliness and public opinion that helped to define the intellectual horizon of Americans during the age of news, she explores the central place of newspapers in Tocqueville’s understanding of democratic life. |
Location Information:
University of Richmond - Weinstein Hall
Room: Brown-Alley Room
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Admission Information:
The Tocqueville Symposium is free and open to the public. |
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