In honor of the 40th anniversary of Professor Diggins’ landmark works, The Lost Soul of American Politics and “The Oyster and the Pearl: The Problem of Contextualism in Intellectual History,” the Ph.D. Program in History at the CUNY Graduate Center will host a two-day conference (April 4-5, 2024) on the theme of origins as a problem in intellectual history and for historians more broadly.
In recent years, origins have become newly controversial among historians and in the public sphere – in battles over the relevance and meaning of first or founding moments, of “originalism” as a mode of constitutional argument, and in renewed debate about what “presentism” is and when it is or is not a problem. Yet for intellectual historians, questions of origin are, if anything, fundamental to the enterprise of investigating how ideas matter in history. In other words, whether stated or not, establishing intellectual origins has often been a central work that intellectual historians do for each other and for historical narratives of many kinds. How are historians thinking about ideas in relation to origins now? Does this vary across geographical and temporal fields, and in different traditions and different objects of inquiry, and why? Do origins stories still hold out special promise, duties, or opportunities for intellectual history? What role have origins stories, and ways of analyzing them, played in the continuing evolution of boundaries between history and other disciplines when it comes to scholarship about ideas in the past and present?
Claire Arcenas, Associate Professor of History. University of Montana
Evelyn Burg, Associate Professor of English, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY
Theo Christov, Associate Professor of Honors, History, and International Affairs, George Washington University
Jacob Collins, Associate Professor of History, College of Staten Island, CUNY
Aurelian Craiutu, Professor and Chair of Political Science, Indiana University
Arthur Ghins, Postdoctoral Researcher,, King’s College London
Steve Hayward, Senior Resident Scholar, University of California at Berkeley
Elsbeth Heaman, Professor of History and Classical Studies, McGill University
Alan Kahan, Professor of British Civilization, Université Paris-Saclay
James Livingston, Professor Emeritus of History, Rutgers University
Darrin McMahon, David W. Little Class of 1944 Professor of History, Dartmouth University – keynote speaker
Alaina Morgan, Assistant Professor of History, University of Southern California
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, Merle Curti and Vilas-Borghesi Distinguished Achievement Professor of History, University of Wisconsin – keynote speaker
Richard Samuelson, Associate Professor of Government, Hillsdale College
Ian Stewart, Associate Professor of History, University College London
Richard Whatmore, Chair of Modern History, University of Saint Andrews
Martin Woessner, Associate Professor of the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies, City College, CUNY
Alexander Zevin, Associate Professor of History, College of Staten Island, CUNY
