The first Dartmouth History Institute took place on June 12-14, 2017. Directed by Darrin McMahon and Udi Greenberg, its theme was modern European intellectual history. The participants, nine early-career scholars (advanced graduate students and recent PhDs), arrived from the United States, Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands, and specialize in a wide array of topics, from theology to aesthetic theory and bioethics. For three days, they workshopped chapter and article drafts, and discussed their plans for completing their book projects. They were joined by four senior scholars, who participated in the sessions, guided discussions about theoretical and methodological issues, and shared their own work.

This event was made possible with the generous support of the Department of History at Dartmouth College, the Leslie Center for the Humanities,  the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences, and the Office of the Dean of Faculty.

Directors:

Professor Darrin McMahon (Dartmouth) and Professor Udi Greenberg (Dartmouth)

Participants:

Alexander Arnold (NYU), Joshua Bennet (Oxford), Isabel Gabel (Chicago), Alice Goff (Chicago), Rob Goodman (Columbia), Kristen Loveland (Harvard), Adriana Markantonatos (Marburg), Larry McGrath (Wesleyan), Devin Vartija (Utrecht).

Senior guests:

Dan Edelstein (Stanford), Martin Jay (Berkeley), Samuel Moyn (Yale), Sophia Rosenfeld (UPenn).

Biographies:

Dan Edelstein is the William H. Bonsall Professor of French at Stanford University and the Chair of the Division of Literature, Cultures, and Languages. He is the author of the Terror of Natural Right (Chicago, 2009) and The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago, 2010). He is currently writing two books, The Spirit of Rights and On Permanent Revolution, and directs the NEH-funded digital humanities project, Mapping the Republic of Letters.

Udi Greenberg is an associate professor of history at Dartmouth College. He is the author of The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton UP 2014), which won the Council for European Studies’ prize for best first book in the field in 2016, as well as several articles on European thought, politics, and religion.

Martin Jay is the Ehrman Professor emeritus of European history at the University of California-Berkeley. Among his works are The Dialectical Imagination (l973 and l996); Marxism and Totality (l984); Adorno (l984); Permanent Exiles (l985); Fin-de-Siècle Socialism (l989); Force Fields (l993); Downcast Eyes (l993); Cultural Semantics (l998); Refractions of Violence (2003); Songs of Experience (2004); The Virtues of Mendacity (2010); Essays from the Edge (2011); Kracauer: l’Exilė (2014); and Reason After its Eclipse (2016). His research interests are in modern European Intellectual History, Critical Theory and Visual Culture.

Darrin McMahon is the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of history at Dartmouth College, and the author/editor of six books, including most recently Divine Fury: A History of Genius (Basic, 2013), and, with Samuel Moyn, Rethinking Modern European History (OUP, 2014). He is currently writing a short book on illumination in the age of Enlightenment and a history of ideas of equality.

Samuel Moyn is Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law and Professor of History at Harvard University. His most recent book, based on Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in fall 2014, is Christian Human Rights (2015).

Sophia Rosenfeld is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is Common Sense: A Political History (Harvard, 2011). She is currently co-editor of the journal Modern Intellectual History and a six-volume Cultural History of Ideas from Antiquity to the Present (to be published by Bloomsbury) and is at work in a book called The Choices We Make: The Roots of Modern Freedom (to be published by Princeton).

Alexander Arnold is a Ph.D. candidate in New York University’s History Department and Institute of French Studies, as well as a fellow at the Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Focusing on modern European intellectual history, Alexander’s work integrates the history of economics with the history of science and the history of political thought. He is currently writing a dissertation entitled Rethinking Economics in Modern France. After defending his dissertation this summer, Alexander will be beginning a J.D. at New York University Law School, where he will be a Furman Academic Scholar.

Joshua Bennett read for undergraduate and graduate degrees in History at Christ Church, Oxford. His doctoral research, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, focused on debates over the relationship between religion and historical progress in nineteenth-century British intellectual culture. After holding a fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research in London, and a lectureship at St John's College, Oxford, he returned to Christ Church as a Junior Research Fellow in 2016. His first book, Doctrine, progress, and history: British religious debate 1845-1914, will be published by Oxford University Press.

Isabel Gabel is a postdoctoral fellow in Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago.  She is working on a book about biology, humanism, and historical thought in 20th-century France. 

Alice Goff is Assistant Professor of German History at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of modern Germany with particular focus on in the history of museums, cultural diplomacy, and art history and aesthetics. Her current book project, "The God Behind the Marble: Transcending the Object in the German Aesthetic State," is a study of the French looting of European art in the Napoleonic period and its consequences for German cultural political thought and practice in the nineteenth century. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley in 2015; between 2015-2017 she was a postdoctoral fellow with the University of Michigan Society of Fellows. She is the author of "The Selbst Gewählter Plan: The Schildbach Wood Library in 18th Century Hessen-Kassel," Representations (2014) and a forthcoming article, "The Honor of The Trophy: A Prussian Bronze in the Napoleonic Era" in The Things They Carried: War, Migration, and Material Culture, ed. Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra (Cornell, 2017). 

Rob Goodman is a PhD candidate in political theory at Columbia University and a Heyman Center for the Humanities fellow. He is a former congressional speechwriter and the co-author of two books: Rome's Last Citizen, a book on Cato the Younger and the Roman Republic, and A Mind at Play, a biography of Claude Shannon. 

Kristen Loveland specializes in modern European intellectual, gender, and legal history and is currently finishing her doctorate at Harvard University. Her dissertation, titled “Re-producing the Human: Dignity, Eugenics, and Governing Reproductive Technology in Germany,” is being supervised by Peter Gordon and Judith Surkis. For the 2016-17 academic year, she is a Research Visitor at the Centre for History and Economics, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. In 2016, she received her JD from NYU Law, magna cum laude and Order of the Coif, where she was a Furman Academic Scholar and Articles Editor on the NYU Law Review. She received an MPhil in Modern European History with distinguished performance from the University of Cambridge and a BA in History and a concentration in Creative Writing from Columbia University. 

Adriana Markantonatos studied European Ethnology/Cultural Sciences and Art History at the Philipps-University Marburg, with a Magister-Thesis on body stylization in the fashion magazine VOGUE in 2008. Since 2009 until recently I have been research assistant at the German Documentation Center for Art History – Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, being responsible for the research project “Begriffsgeschichte und Bildpolitik: Erforschung des wissenschaftlichen Nachlasses von Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006)”, which was realized in close cooperation with the German Literature Archive Marbach. Part of the project was my Ph.D.-Thesis on “Geschichtsdenken zwischen Bild und Text. Reinhart Kosellecks ‘Suche nach dem Unsichtbaren’”, which I submitted in March this year. I will continue to work on Koselleck’s archive in the context of exhibitions and as editor of his essays on political iconology, and I will start as head of research at TECHNOSEUM Mannheim, to work on the family archive of Carl Benz, the inventor of the automobile. I am used to working at the intersection of archive, museum and university, while my research is strongly interdisciplinary with a special interest in Intellectual History, the History of the Humanities/ Wissenschaftsgeschichte and its theory. 

Larry McGrath is currently an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University. He received his doctorate in Intellectual History as well as an MA in Philosophy from Johns Hopkins University. When Larry’s not backpacking in the Green Mountains, he spends his time writing and reading about the human sciences (i.e., neurology, physiology, psychology, philosophy) in France and America. A driving aim of his work is to fit scientific literature more comfortably into what counts as modern intellectual history. To that end, Larry’s intrigued by the uses of neuroscience in the 19th century as well as their abuses - especially in historiographical theory – today. 

Devin Vartija is a PhD candidate in the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, where he is researching the complex interplay between equality and racial classification in Enlightenment thought. He completed his MA in history at Utrecht University and a Bachelor of Arts and Science at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. He has been a visiting graduate student at Princeton University and at UCLA. His essay 'Empathy, Equality, and the Radical Enlightenment' was recently published by Routledge in Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment.