VISITING SCHOLARS
F. Ross Johnson-Connaught Distinguished
Visitors In American Studies
Funded by a generous endowment from University of Toronto alumnus F. Ross Johnson as well as the University's Connaught fund, this program brings a leading Americanist to the University of Toronto for a period of residence during the academic year. Distinguished Visitors spend a concentrated period with faculty and students connected to our undergraduate American Studies program and to one or more other programs or departments, at both the undergraduate and graduate level; they also give a public lecture in the F. Ross Johnson-Connaught Speaker Series.
RECENT VisitING SCHOLARS
2012-2013
Lisa Lowe
Professor of European and American Studies, Department of English, Tufts University
Lisa Lowe is currently Professor of European and American Studies in the Department of English at Tufts University. Lowe is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms, and Immigrant Acts: on Asian American Cultural Politics. She is the co-editor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, and a third book, Metaphors of Globalization, is forthcoming. Her current project, The Intimacies of Four Continents, is a study of the convergence of colonialisms in the early Americas as the conditions for modern humanism and humanistic knowledge. Lowe is the 2012-13 F. Ross Johnson Visiting Scholar in American Studies, Centre for the Study of the United States.
2011-2012
Ronald Numbers
Hilldale Professor of the History of Medicine, University of Wisconsin
Ron Numbers is the Hilldale Professor of the History of Medicine, at the University of Wisconsin, and the Visiting Scholar at the Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto. He is an eminent scholar of the history of science, medicine, and religion in the United States. He is the author of numerous books, including Darwinisim Comes to America (Harvard, 1998); The Creationists (California 1992, and more recently, Harvard); Almost Persuaded: American Physicians and Compulsory Health Insurance, 1912-1920 (Hopkins 1978), as well as over ten edited volumes. Numbers has won numerous awards, including an American Association for the Advancement of Science fellowship, and a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship. He was President of the History of Science Society (2000-2001) and the American Society of Church History (1999-2000). Numbers was in residence at CSUS in February-March, 2012.
Past Academic Years:
2010-2011
Christopher Hedges
Journalist and Senior Fellow, the Nation Institute.
In residence October 18 to November 5, 2010: Prof. Hedges will be teaching an advanced undergraduate seminar, "The Christian Right and the Open Society," in partnership with the Department and Centre for the Study of Religion. For the class, click here.
Christopher Lynn Hedges is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent who specializes in US and Middle Eastern politics. Currently a senior fellow at the Nation Institute in New York, Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans; he has reported for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, and the New York Times (for which he as a foreign correspondent for 15 years). In 2002, Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He is also a best selling author, perhaps best known for his book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction; his most recent work is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009). In 2002, Hedges received in 2002 the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He has taught at Columbia, NYU, and Princeton. He currently writies a column for Truthdig.
2008-2009
Anna Everett
Chair of Film Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara
Anna Everett works in the fields of film and TV history/theory, African-American film and culture, and Digital Media Technologies. She is the author of Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949 (Duke Univ. Press, 2001) and is currently at work on books titled Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace, and Inside the Dark Museum: An Anthology of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1959. Recent articles include: “The Revolution Will Be Digitized: Afrocentricity and the Digital Public Sphere” (Social Text, Summer 2002) and “‘I Want the Same Things Other People Enjoy’: The Black Press and the Classic Hollywood Studio System” (Spectator, 1997). She is founder and managing editor of the Internet newsletter, Screening Noir Online; and she is currently co-organizing the conference titled "Race in Digital Space 2.0."
2007-2008
Ann Cvetkovich
Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Texas at Austin.
Ann Cvetkovich isProfessor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (1992) and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003). In residence: Wednesday Feb. 27th and March 20th, 2008. She will be teaching a seminar entitled ‘Public Feelings’ during this time, which meets on M, T, Th 4-6:30 pm; undergrads should enroll through the American Studies program, and graduate students through the Institute for Women and Gender Studies. She will be giving her public lecture on Friday March 14, 2008 and a faculty seminar on March 5, 4-6 pm, in Munk 208N. Working with CSUS affiliate Michael Cobb, we have also received some additional funding from the Jackman Humanities Institute to launch a ‘Feel Tank Toronto’ on March 14-14, 2008.
2006-2007
Clyde Wilcox
Professor of Government, Georgetown University
Research and teaching interests center on public opinion and electoral behavior; religion and politics;
the politics of social issues such as abortion, gay rights, and gun control; interest group politics, campaign finance, and science fiction and politics. He has authored, coauthored, edited, or co-edited more than 20 books. His most recent include The Christian Right in American Politics, and the Financiers of Congressional Elections: Investors, Ideologues, and Intimates. Description of visit: His January 2007 visit was coordinated
by Prof. David Rayside (Political Science/SDS). Prof. Wilcox was also a keynote speaker in the January 2007 conference 'Politics, Religion, and Sexuality in the United States and Canada.'
2005-2006
Jan Radway
Frances Fox Professor of Literature, Duke University
Janice Radway is Frances Fox Professor of Literature (Ph.D. in English and American Studies, Michigan State University, 1977). Before coming to Duke, she taught in the American Civilization Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also served as editor of the American Quarterly. She is the author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, and the recently published, A Feeling for Books: The Book-
of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle Class Desire. Her most recent article length publications include "Gender in the Field of Ideological Production: Feminist Cultural Studies, the Problem of the Political Subject, and the Aims of Knowledge Production" (2005). "Research Universities, Periodical Publication and the Circulation of Professional Expertise: On the Significance of Middlebrow Authority." Critical Inquiry ( 2004),
and "What's In a Name?" The Futures of American Studies (2003). Her current research interests are in the history of literacy and reading in the United States, particularly as they bear on the lives of women. She is currently working on the history of the book in the United States in the twentieth century (with Carl Kaestle) as part of the American Antiquarian Society's collaborative project on the history of the book. She is a past president of the American Studies Association.
2005-2006
Marcus Rediker
Professor of History, University of Pittsburgh
Marcus Rediker is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. He has written (or co-written) four books: Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Beacon Press/Verso 2004); The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantis (Beacon/Verso 2000), Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 1 (Pantheon, 1989) and Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge UP, 1987). He has had his writings translated into French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Rediker has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment of the Humanities, and the Andrew P. Mellon Foundation.
2004-2005
Pierangelo Castagneto
Pierangelo Castagneto is an Italian scholar of 20th century American literary culture. Prof. Castagneto spent the year in residence at U of T, living on campus in Massey College. While at the University of Toronto, he taught two undergraduate semester-length courses, including USA 400H in the fall term on Blues music, and HIS 496H, Populism in Industrial America, in the history department (Winter term).
2003-2004
Heinz Ickstadt
Professor Emeritus and former Director of the John F.Kennedy Institute for North American Studies,
Free University, Berlin
Recent publications include: "American Studies in an Age of Globalization," American Quarterly (2002); Faces of Fiction: Essays on American Literature and Culture from the Jacksonian Period to Postmodernity (2001); and Crossing Borders: Inner- and Intercultural Exchanges in a Multicultural Society (1997). He was in residence in March 2004 and taught a course entitled "Post-mimetic and Post-centric Fictions: Texts, Contexts, and Paradigms of the Contemporary (North) American Novel."
2002-2003
Neil Smith
Professor of Anthropology and Geography, CUNY Grad Center
Author of more than 120 articles, chapters and books, including American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Cal, 2003). Prof. Smith was in residence in October, 2002 and taught an intensive course, open to grad students (mostly in Geography) and by permission 4th year students, called “American Empire: Lost Geographies and Failed Globalization from Versailles to Afghanistan.”
2001-2002
Todd Gitlin
Professor of Culture and Communication, NYU
Author of numerous books, including The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987). Prof. Gitlin was in residence in March 2002, and he taught an intensive course in the History dept. grad program, open to all grad students and 4th yr students by special permission. The course was called “Media Unlimited: The Torrent of Images and Sounds in American Life."
2000-2001
Lauren Berlant
Professor of English, University of Chicago
Author of numerous books concerning affect and citizenship, among other topics, including The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, 1997). Prof. Berlant's visit was the inaugeral visit in the F. Ross Johnson Distinguished Visiting Scholar series. As part of her visit, she conducted a seminar: “After Great Pain: From Sentimentality to Trauma in the U.S. Liberal Tradition.”
