Stephanie Almeida Nevin (Yale) is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Yale University with research interests in contemporary political theory and the history of political thought. Her dissertation examines competing conceptions of the relationship between politics and education in the works and philosophical traditions of Plato, Rousseau, and John Dewey.
Leonard Cassuto (Fordham) is Professor of English at Fordham and the author or editor of eight books on American literature and culture, most recently The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (2015), inspired by the monthly column, “The Graduate Adviser,” that he writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Other recent books include The Cambridge History of the American Novel (General Editor, 2011), and The Cambridge Companion to Baseball (2011), winner of the Best Anthology Award from the North American Society of Sports Historians.
Jamila Elnashef (Yale) is a doctoral candidate at Tel Aviv University. Currently, she is finalizing writing her dissertation as a pre-doc at Yale University as part of the Fox International Fellowship. Her dissertation, entitled “A lab of one’s own’ Senior female scientists in research institutes in Israel: Policy, gender politics and personal experience” examines the Israeli Women’s ‘Quiet Revolution’ as first generation to Higher Education after the Holocaust. In that vein, her dissertation explores the inclusion of senior female scientists in prestigious scientific disciplines at research universities through their narratives of their career paths. Thus, she investigates the tension between ‘Modernity and Tradition’ in research universities through this revolution.
The next phase of her research will examine the influence of the modern research university on constructing an ‘academic civilization’ and how universities developed into one of the world’s most powerful institutions: creating global connections, cooperation, and producing a shared scientific culture, which she calls the ‘Scientific Sphere’.
Milton Gaither (Messiah College) is Professor of Education at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in History of Education from Indiana University at Bloomington and his M.A.R from Yale University. His publications include Homeschool: An American History (2008, 2017), American Educational History Revisited: A Critique of Progress (2001), and American Education: A History (6th edition, forthcoming). He also edited the Wiley Handbook of Home Education (2017). He serves on the board of and functions as review editor for the International Center for Home Education Research.
Anthony T. Grafton (Princeton) studied history, classics and history of science at the University of Chicago and University College London. He teaches European history at Princeton University, where he has worked since 1975. His books include Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford, 1983-93); Defenders of the Text (Harvard, 1991); The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard, 1997); with Brian Curran, Pamela Long and Benjamin Weiss, Obelisk (MIT, 2008), and (with Joanna Weinberg) “I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue.” Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and A Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Harvard, 2011).
Jeffrey Guhin (UCLA) is an assistant professor of Sociology at UCLA and his research interests include education, culture, religion, and theory. His first book, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, is tentatively titled Let There Be No Compulsion: Muslim and Christian Schools in America, and it’s a comparison of two Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical Christian high schools. His next book, for which I have completed fieldwork, is an ethnographic comparison of morality and citizenship in three urban public school districts.
Kristine Haugen (Caltech) is professor of English at Caltech, the earthly paradise of sun and Nobel Prizes, and she has published extensively on British and European intellectual history. Her first book, on Europe’s most mercurial classical scholar, Richard Bentley, appeared in 2011, and in other articles she has discussed the history of universities, intellectuals in prison, and conflict in the early modern Republic of Letters. Her talk today explores humanist research in the university before 1800, in other words, how intrepid scholars exploited and even changed an institution that was not designed for them.
Kelsey Kauffman graduated from Yale in 1971. Soon afterwards, a bloody uprising took place at Attica prison. To better understand prisons, she spent a year as a correctional officer at the Connecticut State Prison for Women, and then followed a cohort of 60 officers in men’s prisons for four years. Her book, Prison Officers and Their World (Harvard U. Press, 1988) documents the devastating effect that working in prisons has on officers. Her research shifted to white supremacy among prison officers and mothers in prison. In 2012 she founded a college program at the Indiana State Prison for Women, and now works with incarcerated and post-incarcerated women on public policy and prison history.
John Langbein (Yale)
Stuart W. Leslie (Johns Hopkins) is a professor of the history of science and technology at The Johns Hopkins University, where he has taught since 1981. His books include The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford, and a biography of inventor Charles Kettering. He recent research has focused primarily on the architecture of science and the design of laboratories, hospitals, and observatories, including a series of articles published in Physics Today. He is currently writing a history of the Johns Hopkins University, including its schools of medicine, public health, nursing, and other divisions.
George Levesque (Yale)
Emily Levine (UNC-Greensboro) is Associate Professor of Modern European history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Levine received her Ph.D. in History and the Humanities at Stanford and her B.A. from Yale (where she later returned as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow). She is the author of Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School (University of Chicago Press, 2013), which was awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize by the American Historical Association for the best book in European history from 1815 through the 20th century. Levine has published in the New York Times, the LA Review of Books, Foreign Policy, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed, as well as in top scholarly journals. She recently completed Academic Innovators: The Transformation of Higher Education in Germany and America, which was supported by fellowships from the National Humanities Center and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press.
Mordechai Levy-Eichel (Yale) is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions, and a lecturer in Political Science. He is currently writing a book on the origins of the American research university and the research ideal, focusing on the history, structures, and values of scholarship and research, across both the humanities the sciences, from classics to mathematics (both today and way back when).
Adam Nelson (Wisconsin-Madison) studies the history of American education. His publications include Education and Democracy: The Meaning of Alexander Meiklejohn, 1872-1964 (2001); The Elusive Ideal: Equal Educational Opportunity and the Federal Role in Boston’s Public Schools (2005); Education and the Culture of Print in Modern America, co-edited with John L. Rudolph (2010); and The Global University: Past, Present, and Future Perspectives, co-edited with Ian P. Wei (2012). He is currently writing a pair of books titled Capital of Mind: American Colleges and the Making of a Modern Knowledge Economy, 1730-1830, and Empire of Knowledge: Nationalism, Internationalism, and American Science, 1780-1830.
Micha Perry (Yale)
Samuel Rocha (British Columbia) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is author of A Primer for Philosophy and Education, Folk Phenomenology, and Tell Them Something Beautiful. He is currently writing two books on the thought of Ivan Illich and completing another book on curriculum theory.
Travis Ross (Yale)
Emily Rutherford (Columbia) is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Columbia University. She works on the politics and culture of gender and education in modern Britain, and is writing a dissertation about conflicts over gender in British universities between 1860 and 1935. She also has previously published, and continues to work, on the history of male homosexuality in modern Britain. Find out more at her website or follow her on Twitter @echomikeromeo.
Ben Schmidt (Northeastern) is an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University and core faculty at the NuLab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. His research interests are in the digital humanities and the intellectual and cultural history of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. His digital humanities research focuses on large-scale text analysis, humanities data visualization, and the challenges and opportunities of reading data itself as a historical source. His current project, Creating Data, explores practices of data collection in the 19th century American state through archival research, visualization, and re-analysis of historical data. He also contributes to popular conversations on topics including higher education in the United States, computational detection of anachronisms in historical fiction, and the “crisis” of the humanities.
Yingqi (Ariel) Tang is a PhD student in political theory at Yale University. Her academic interests broadly cover topics in the history of political thought, philosophy of education, and comparative political theory. Her current research examines the idea of apprenticeship in eighteenth and nineteenth century German and French political thought.
Jacqueline Vayntrub (Yale)