The American Studies Center and the Faculty of History are pleased to invite you to two talks by Prof. Steven Conn!

Urban History and the Question of Scale

Monday, May 20, 2024
1:15 PM

&

Demystifying Rural America

Tuesday, May 21, 2024
4:45 PM

Where?

May 20, 2024 (Monday, 1:15 PM)
Faculty of History (Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28, Columned Hall)

May 21, 2024 (Tuesday, 4:45 PM)
American Studies Center (Dobra 55, Room 2.118)
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)

Urban History and the Question of Scale

Urban historians take for granted that our subject is “the city”. But that then begs the question of how we define a city and what we don’t. Population? Geographic area? Economic and/or political function? Professor Conn will revisit Louis Wirth’s 1938 essay “Urbanism as a Way of Life” to make the case that urban historians need to consider questions of scale and that we might turn our attention to places usually too small to be considered cities.

Demystifying Rural America

Rural America is often characterized as in crisis or in danger of being left behind and that sense of alienation has driven the politics of rural places. Professor Conn will argue that rural Americanhas actually been at the center of modern American history, shaped by the same forces as everywhere else in the country: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and suburbanization.

Who?

Steven Conn is the W. E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Before joining the faculty at Miami he was a professor in the history department at Ohio State where he co-founded Origins and founded the Public History Initiative. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 after graduating from Yale University in 1987.

Prof. Conn is a specialist in American cultural and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th centuries, urban history and public history. He is the author of 5 books and the editor of 2 more including most recently Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the 20th Century (Oxford UP, 2014) which was named a Top Ten book for 2015 by Planetizen. He is currently working on two book projects. The first is a history of American business schools which examines their contentious relationship to the rest of higher education; the second is a study of mid-20th century liberalism and the idea of “empathy” fostered by a number of writers, academics and others.

News

Extending the ELS

March 3, 2025

Extending the ELS (electronic student ID) validity will take place on March 17 – 20, 2025 from 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.

American Studies Colloquium Series

March 6: Bending Reality to Economics

March 1, 2025

We are delighted to invite you to the first lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025 Spring semester! This talk examines the nested narrative of Hernan Diaz’s novel Trust as a motif by which the novel engages with the form of the financialized economy, in parallel with how its plot reflects on the lives of New York’s financial elite. By reframing the story of the 1929 crash through several mediations from the ‘reality’—a novel-with-the-novel, notes for a biography, reflections on this process by the ghost writer of said biography, and finally a personal journal—Trust draws our attention to the financialized economy as an exercise of substituting models for the thing itself, with inevitable distortions and lost data.

Year 2024/2025

February 25: Immortality in Televised Media – The Negative Sides of Being a (Super?)human

February 25, 2025

Join us for the second Weird TV lecture in 2025! Immortality as a concept has existed since ancient times, but unlike then, the term nowadays is rarely connected to chasing eternal youth or extending one’s life indefinitely. The concept of immortality in contemporary popular culture, propagated often through TV shows for children and adolescents alike, is usually connected with superheroes and the supernatural in general. Portrayed mostly as invincibility or ability to sustain damage that would otherwise kill a regular human, the focus is put on the physical sides of this concept, rarely on the mental side of being immortal. Death, after all, awaits everyone in the end, it is ingrained into human culture. As a species, we are drawn as much to creating, as we are to destroying, including ourselves.

Year 2024/2025

February 18: Solidarity in Struggle – A Conversation with Sarah Schulman

February 18, 2025

We invite you to a meeting with the author of “The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity,” Sarah Schulman, hosted by MA student at the ASC Julia Wajdziak. Together, we will look at the role of solidarity in contemporary activism, the challenges it faces, and the opportunities it creates for transnational alliances.

News

Dołącz do Akademii Młodych Polskich Innowatorów i wygraj płatny staż!

January 23, 2025

Chcesz wziąć udział w stażu w amerykańskiej firmie? Masz 18–26 lat? Interesujesz się przedsiębiorczością, mediami lub sprawami publicznymi? Chcesz zdobyć wiedzę i doświadczenie od ekspertów z USA i Polski, a także pracować nad innowacyjnym projektem, który odpowie na aktualne wyzwania gospodarcze i społeczne dla Polski? Jesteś z Warszawy lub jesteś gotowy/a dojeżdżać do stolicy na warsztaty i staż? Jeżeli na powyższe pytania odpowiedź brzmi TAK!, to dołącz do programu „Pathfinders of Tomorrow: Akademia Młodych Polskich Innowatorów”, który łączy młodych liderów z praktykami, by wspólnie tworzyć nowatorskie rozwiązania.