Tag Archives: intellectual history

PhD candidate Glauco Schettini receives the Farrar Memorial Award of the Society for French Historical Studies.

PhD candidate Glauco Schettini is the winner of a Farrar Memorial Award of the Society for French Historical Studies. The award, which consists of a prize of $5,000 and recognizes outstanding dissertations that deal with French history broadly conceived, will support research for Glauco’s in-progress dissertation project, titled “The Catholic Counterrevolution: A Global Intellectual History, 1780s-1840s.” In his dissertation, Glauco looks at networks of counterrevolutionary Catholic intellectuals spanning from Europe to Latin America to trace the emergence of Catholicism as a new, distinct ideology in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Glauco’s “exciting doctoral research,” write the members of the Society’s Award Committee, which included Profs. Daniel Sherman, Rebecca Spang, Robin Mitchell, and Paul Cohen, “will change how we teach both the history of ideas and the history of religion.”

You can follow him on Twitter at @GlaucoSchettini.

Glauco Schettini

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Doctoranda, Doctorandus: Celebrating Two Successful Doctoral Defenses

Doctoranda: Elizabeth Kuhl at a post-defense luncheon with her committee, Nicholas Paul, Richard Gyug, and Tom O’Donnell and examiner Maryanne Kowaleski. Doctorandus: Jonathan Woods with committee members Christopher Maginn, Susan Wabuda, and Nicholas Paul

In the Fordham History Department the month of August is often a quiet time, but the department came back to life with excitement as two doctoral students defended their dissertations after years of research, writing, and revision. The History blog congratulates Elizabeth Kuhl and Jonathan Woods, who both successfully defended in the past few weeks. Continue reading

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Recent Fordham PhD Laurence Jurdem published in the National Review

 

Congratulations to Laurence Jurdem, who received his PhD in History at Fordham, for publishing an article in the National Review.

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Tea with Cédric Giraud 4/19 1:30PM at Medieval Studies

This Tuesday Fordham hosts visiting scholar Cédric Giraud for tea and a workshop about twelfth-century charters. Dr. Giraud is a graduate of the École nationale des chartes in Paris and a leading expert on Anselm of Laon, twelfth-century intellectual life and spirituality, and the history of Notre Dame. He is the author of numerous books, articles, and scholarly editions, and is currently collaborating with the history department’s own Alex Novikoff on a project related to the Twelfth Century Renaissance. You can watch a recent presentation (in French) by Dr. Giraud’s at the prestigious College de France here.

The workshop will take place from 1:30-2:15pm in the Medieval Studies seminar room and will be followed by coffee/tea and cookies. For further information, please contact Dr. Alex Novikoff.

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Graduate Courses in History, Fall 2016

The History Department is excited to announce our lineup of Fall Courses for 2016. As always, the courses reflect the depth of expertise of our faculty and the rich variety of themes and perspectives on offer in our program. The full complement of six courses in Medieval, Early Modern, Modern European, and US history (with one course offering a global perspective on US history) is designed to provide all of our students with opportunities to pursue periods, areas, and subjects of interest to them. Medievalists can begin their year-long proseminar/seminar sequence, while other students identify topics and mentors for their final research papers.

 

Students should remember to contact the director of graduate studies before making their selections.

HIST 5411 Gender and Sexuality in Early America (Mondays, 5:30-7:20)

From Professor Doron Ben-Atar,  author of the recent book, Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic, comes this new course offering, encompassing “readings in the history of gender and sexuality discourse in Early America and the British Atlantic world of the 17th and 18th centuries.” Students of US History and the history of gender and sexuality

HIST 5506 European Nationalisms and Early Modern (Jewish) History (Mondays, 3:30-5:20)

One of our newest faculty members, and the department’s first Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies and director of Jewish Studies at Fordham, Magda Teter presents her first graduate course at Fodham in Fall 2016.

From the course description:

Modern historiography, including Jewish historiography, and history as an academic discipline are products of modern national movements. The narratives they produced provide tools for shaping national and ethnic identities in the modern era, and had long lasting ramifications not only for the study of history but also for the inclusion or exclusion of specific groups in modern European societies. This course will explore how the writing of history has been linked to the larger questions of national identity, and nationalism, and to questions of political inclusion and exclusions. We will read the early Jewish historians of Germany, Poland, and Palestine/Israel and explore how their visions of premodern Jewish history were shaped by larger questions that were also occupying other European historians and intellectuals.

HIST 5915 US and Latin American Borderlands (Wednesdays 3:30-7:20)

Professor Salvador Acosta is another history faculty member with a new book out:  Sanctioning Marriage: Interethnic Marriage in the Arizona Borderlands. As the title implies, Professor Acosta is a leading authority on the history of the US and its borders, especially with Latin America. As the description of his course explains,

This course explores the concept of the borderlands, i.e., the political and geographic spaces where groups of people meet and interact. Individuals enter these areas with acquired cultural and ideological backgrounds that undergo transformations as they encounter different customs and worldviews. The course focuses on United States and Latin American history, in particular, on the roles of nation building and its concomitant identity construction. It uses various categories of analysis, such as race, gender, and hegemony, to discuss the interaction among groups of people as they meet along political and geographic borders.

HIST 6530 The European City 1700-2000 (Thursdays 5:30-7:20)

Professor Rosemary Wakeman is the director of Urban Studies at Fordham, who has published on the history of French cities, including books on the cities of Toulouse and Paris and is currently working on the history of the New Town Movement.

From the course description:

This course concentrates on theoretical and interpretive approaches to the study of the city and urban life. It considers the transformation of urban space and culture from the eighteenth century to the present during which commercial capitalism, industrialization, and massive human migration remade basic social and cultural relationships. Among the key factors of investigation are class and mass culture, gender, production and consumption, accumulation and cultural display, architecture and planning, and the evolution of urban space and topography.

HIST 6152 Medieval Women and the Family (Tuesdays, 3;30-5:20)

Professor Maryanne Kowaleski is the former director of Medieval Studies at Fordham and former President of the Medieval Academy of America. Fresh from a year’s research leave at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Professor Kowaleski will offer the medieval elective course covering the critical areas of social, economic, and gender history.

From the course description:

This course surveys recent historiography on the roles and status of women in medieval society, as well as the structures and dynamics of medieval families.  Among the debates to be explored are the effect on medieval society of the Christian Church’s teachings on virginity, sex, and marriage, and the influence of geography (northern vs Mediterranean Europe), environment (village, town, and convent), and status (noble, bourgeois, or peasant) on the work, family role, and authority of women. Chronologically the course will range from the early Christian period to the Renaissance. Recent scholarly work on nuns, mystics, and beguines will be examined, and readings will also cover different approaches to the study of women and family, including the methodologies of literary scholars, demographers, feminists, and legal historians.

HIST 7056 Proseminar: Medieval Political Cultures (Wednesdays 5-7:20PM) 

When he is not wearing the hat of Director of Graduate Studies in the History Department, Professor Nicholas Paul is a historian of the medieval aristocracy, the crusades, and medieval political culture. In 2016-7 he will offer the Proseminar/Seminar sequence, a year long course that allows medievalists a full semester to master the historiography on a given topic. With the topic and extensive background reading in hand, students will spend the Spring semester conducting research and writing their final papers. The course description explains:

This course, the first part of a two-semester proseminar/seminar sequence will introduce students to recent debates and different approaches to cultures of power and political processes in western Europe in the central middle ages. Among the many topics we might consider are: lordship, status and the sources of political authority; the origins and significance of consultative assemblies; the rituals and rhetoric of courtliness and persuasion; the relationship between rulership and sanctity; and the rise of accountability. Through in-class presentations and discussions, students will become familiar with a wide range of source material, from diplomatic and documentary collections to historical narratives and courtly literature.

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The History of “Capital”: Steven Stoll on the Origins of the Term

John of Genoa

In anticipation of our Thursday event “Tracking the Global History of Capitalism” with Sven Beckert, we asked Professor Steven Stoll to tell us about the history of the term “capital”. Where does the word come from, and what does it say about the history of capitalism?

Professor Stoll writes:

Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton is about how cotton became the key commodity in the making of nineteenth-century global capitalism. It’s the story of land and slavery, financiers and merchants, and competition between the American South and India for dominance in production. But Beckert hesitates to define capital or capitalism. Here is a quick take and a few thoughts about the word itself and the world it creates.

Capital is money in motion. It’s not a bag of seed or a college education or an idea for a new business or your terrific potential as an artist or the car you drive to work. It’s not even the same thing as wealth. If capital is any of these things, then it’s existed for as long as Homo sapiens and has no historical specificity. It is surplus value in the act of generating surplus value–profit that creates profit. Marx expressed it as M→C (LP + MP)→P→C’→M+∆M, in which Money is advanced to buy Commodities, consisting of Labor-Power, the Means of Production (which would include land or factories and raw material). Labor is the most important purchase because it is the only factor that creates more value than it costs. If a capitalist pays someone $10 for a day’s work he can use their labor-power to manufacture $100 in widgets. Labor combined with the means of production results in second-order Commodities. These must be sold for the original Money advanced, plus an increment (the surplus-value). Money does not become capital until or unless it is advanced. To paraphrase Forest Gump, capital is as capital does.[i]

The word first appeared between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries for the top or head of something (from caput, or head), like the Corinthian capital of a marble column. It referred to the greatest height or degree, like a capital crime, a capital enemy, capital wounds, and a seat of government (all between 1400 and 1600). At the same time capital developed toward an important sum of money. Fernand Braudel found this sense of the word in Italian as far back as 1211. St. Bernardino of Siena wrote in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century of “that prolific cause of wealth we commonly call capital.” But sums of money had not yet become perpetuating funds.

Other English words carried similar meanings. Cattle and chattel came into English between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, not as words for barnyard creatures but for property, goods, and even money itself. Horses, oxen, and bovines became cattle (around 1400) because they were significant property. The word did not refer to animals as animals in the fifteenth century and did not refer specifically to bovines until the sixteenth century. Stock, another word for accumulated value, stood for something that sprouted and spawned endlessly like a stem or tree trunk until about 1380 when it shows up as a word for domesticated animals. It did not describe a growing herd of livestock until the sixteenth century. But once it did, around that time, stock took a turn. It began to take on meanings similar to capital. It 1526 it referred to money that could be invested, and by 1714 the word was in common use as the subscribed capital of a merchant house.

Capital pulled away from these other words. By the time Smith published The Wealth of Nations political economists in Britain and France had already given capital the meaning it carries today. Smith used the term “capital stock,” suggesting money that reproduced a percentage of itself in a given time. According to Braudel a Russian consul made the essential distinction, reporting that France under Napoleon Bonaparte fought “with her capital,” while the countries that France invaded fought “with their income.” For centuries few institutional pathways existed for employing income in order to earn income. Capital appeared along with these pathways, as people needed a word to differentiate this new entity from merchant wealth and the dividends represented by lambs and calves.[ii]

Historians ask all sorts of questions about capital. One of them is who is inside and who outside its creation. If the owner of one of a sandwich shop on 9th Avenue in New York City reinvests some of her profit by buying bread and tomatoes or by making improvements to the kitchen does that make her a capitalist? What if she has a retirement account with a brokerage firm? Is she a capitalist for making a living in a society organized by capital? To think so blurs categories. It equates the owner of a bodega to the owners of Standard Oil. Firms that generate vast capital have certain characteristics. They tend to operate across national boundaries. They diversify their investments, so that they do not commit themselves to any one commodity. They have deep ties to governments and the global political economy that includes international banking. And they are always looking for new places to get hold of resources and hire labor. There are certainly small capitalist firms, and a business like Wal-Mart began as a country store in an Arkansas town. Capitalism comes from the larger social order, but it then seeks to dominate it. That does not describe the owner of the sandwich shop.

On second thought, maybe we are all capitalists in certain sense. Whether we generate capital or not, command it or not, manage it or not, capital has brought almost all of our occupations into existence. Occupations shape identities, situating people within institutions that lend internal coherence to the social system, regardless of its contradictions. And that social system is tightly bound up with the United States, so much so that many patriotic Americans make little or any distinction between the freedoms detailed in the Bill of Rights and “free enterprise,” even though entrepreneurship has existed for as long as people bought and sold things and even though capitalism in the eighteenth century is nothing like what it is today. “The worst error of all,” Braudel reminds us, “is to suppose that capitalism is simply an ‘economic system’, whereas in fact it lives off the social order, standing almost on a footing with the state, whether as adversary or accomplice.”

So complete has capital become throughout the social order that it appears to have emerged from the natural order, and the behavior it instills seems to many people to be an expression of universal human motives and aspirations. As three historians observe, “One of the distinguishing features of a free-enterprise economy is that its coercion is veiled … Far from being natural, the cues for market participation are given through complicated social codes. Indeed, the illusion that compliance in the dominant economic system is voluntary is itself an amazing cultural artifact.”[iii]  It might be true that the gentry did the same thing in 1650 that they did in 1250. They extracted value from people and environments. But they did it differently than anyone had before, through a discipline imposed by rents and wages, through social codes and cues that appeared to be independent of people. They aren’t. Perhaps the most radical idea we can have about capital, the single most subversive thing we can think about it, is that it begins as nothing more than a relationship between people. Like the meanings of words, relationships change.

[i] “I should say that this is the circuit of capital. It is not a formula for capitalism, which is an entire social system that is based on the recreation or reproduction of capital. Once people began to produce capital they became committed to it, created institutions to further it, connected their identities to it, or could no longer what life was like before it. Capital found its way into so many facets of life and became the basis of giant amalgams of people and production, not to mention nation-states, that any substantial change now seems like it would amount to the end of the world.” – Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 247.

[ii] Fernand Braudel, Wheels of Commerce, tr. Sian Reynolds (New York, 1982), 232-234; Oxford English Dictionary; Smith, Wealth of Nations, 353-355.

[iii] Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York, 1994), 120-1.

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Alex Novikoff to Speak at Pirenne Institute in Gent, Wednesday May 19

Screenshot 2015-05-15 22.02.34

Professor Alex Novikoff will be speaking at the Medieval Seminar Series at the University of Ghent’s Henri Pirenne Institute of Medieval Studies onTuesday, May 19. The Medieval Institute, named in honor of Belgium’s most famous historian of the Middle Ages, brings established international scholars and pairs their lecture with presentations from doctoral students from the University of Ghent. Dr. Novikoff’s talk, “The Ars Disputandi and the ‘Art’ of Disputation,” reprises a lecture delivered at Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies in September and as plenary speaker at the University of California at Berkeley’s Medieval Studies Conference in April.

 

 

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Elizabeth Kuhl to Speak on Rhetoric and History in the Twelfth Century, Tuesday 4/28

4.28.2015 Elizabeth Kuhl

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Winner of the Loomie Prize 2014!

Tobias Hrynick, winner of the 2014 Loomie Prize

Tobias Hrynick, winner of the 2014 Loomie Prize

At a gathering of the History Department on its Spring Open Day, we announced the winners of the Loomie Prize. Each year, the Loomie prize is awarded to the best seminar paper produced during the previous academic year.  All M.A. and Ph.D. students who have taken the proseminar/seminar sequence or a research tutorial are eligible.

 The judges unanimously selected Tobias Hrynick as the winner for 2014, awarding an honorable mention to Stephen Leccesse. Hrynick’s paper, “The Customs of Romney Marsh: Compromise and Common Interest in Wetland Administration,” was written under the supervision of Maryanne Kowaleski for the Medieval History proseminar “Medieval England.”  Leccese’s paper “Emerging From the Sub-Cellar: John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil, and the Rise of Corporate Public Relations in Progressive America, 1902-1908,”  was written under the supervision of Christopher Dietrich. For more information about the Loomie prize papers, read on… Continue reading

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PhD Student Laurence Jurdem Publishes Article on Pair of Communists Turned Cold Warriors

Laurence Jurdem

Laurence Jurdem

Fordham History graduate student Laurence Jurdem has published “James Burnham, Sidney Hook and the Search for Intellectual Truth: From Communism to the Cold War, 1933-1956,” in the latest issue of American Communist History 13:2-3 (2014). The article, which originated as a paper in the US History seminar with Dr. Daniel Soyer, discusses the intellectual odyssey of the conservative foreign policy columnist James Burnham and the public intellectual Sidney Hook. Jurdem examines how the two academics were first fascinated and then disillusioned with the ideas of Karl Marx. That intellectual shift played a decisive role in causing the two men to spend the rest of their careers as advocates for the destruction of the Soviet Union. Jurdem is currently completing his dissertation, entitled “The Power to Define Reality: The Influence of Conservative Media on American Foreign Policy 1964-1984”.

Congratulations, Laurence!

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