Charles Warren Center announces 2003-04 fellows

Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies Lizabeth Cohen, director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, has announced the center’s visiting scholars for the 2003-04 academic year. Each year, the center’s fellows are selected around a theme, which for 2003-04 is “The Political Economy of North America.”

Cohen noted that the Warren Center continues to attract fellows from disciplines outside history and from professional schools, as well as from departments of history: “We are pleased that our outstanding group of fellows includes professors from law and business schools and that one of our workshop coordinators comes from the Kennedy School. We want the Warren Center’s intellectual program to represent the full range of scholars engaged in historical research, which goes well beyond history departments. Next year, when our theme will be ‘The Culture and Politics of the Built Environment,’ we expect to involve scholars from architecture and urban design who share a commitment to history.”

This year’s topic, coordinated by Sven Beckert, professor of history, and Alex Keyssar, Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, concentrates on the evolution of different forms and institutions of power in the United States as well as on the intersection of economic change with politics. Fellows and invited speakers investigate the shifting relations between state and society, the shaping of political institutions, the relationships among business, labor, and the state, the definition of property rights, and, most generally, the processes through which political and economic power has been acquired, distributed, and exercised in the United States.

The 2003-04 Charles Warren Fellows and their research topics are as follows:

Christine Desan (J.D., Yale), Harvard Law School: “Markets and the Constitutional Order in 18th Century America” (spring term).

Colleen Dunlavy (Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology [M.I.T.]), University of Wisconsin: “The Corporation as a Democratic Polity in the 19th Century” (spring term).

Pierre Gervais (Ph.D., L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), Université Paris VIII: “Examining the Industrial Revolution: Technical Progress or Collapse of a Pre-Industrial Political Economy?”

Meg Jacobs (Ph.D., University of Virginia), M.I.T.: “Inflation – The Permanent Dilemma: Postwar Politics and the American Middle Class.”

Joseph A. McCartin (Ph.D., State University of New York, Binghamton), Georgetown University: “The PATCO Strike, the Crisis of Public Employee Unionism, and the Decline of the U.S. Labor Movement, 1962-1982.”

Alice O’Connor (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University), University of California, Santa Barbara: “The Problem of Wealth in the Affluent Society.”

Ronald Schatz (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh), Wesleyan University: “Collective Biography of John Dunlop, Clark Kerr, and Other NWLB Staff.”

Robert J. Steinfeld (Ph.D. and LL.M., Harvard University, J.D., Boston College), State University of New York, Buffalo, School of Law: “Judicial Limitations on Legislative Power and the Early Expansion of the American Suffrage.”

Richard E. Sylla (Ph.D., Harvard University), New York University, Stern School: “The Federalist Financial Revolution, 1787-1830” (affiliated scholar).

Cyrus R. Veeser (Ph.D., Columbia University), Bentley College: “Monopoly Practices in a Liberal Age: Concessions and U.S.-Latin American Economic Relations, 1880-1910” (fall term, affiliated scholar, spring term).

For more information, visit the Charles Warren Center’s Web site at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~cwc/.