Search Fellows
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Julia Cathleen Ott
The New School
Visiting Scholar
2009 to 2010
Julia Cathleen Ott, assistant professor in the history of capitalism at Eugene Lang College and the Graduate Faculty of the New School University, will write a book on the origins of the concept of “democratic investing” in America from 1890-1932.
Elaine Pagels
Princeton University
Visiting Scholar
2006 to 2007
Elaine Pagels, Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion at Princeton University, will write a book that will place the New Testament Book of Revelation in its first century historical context and explore its enduring cultural influence. She will examine how the early Christian movement in Rome was an early example of a conscious effort to separate religion and politics, a phenomenon which, she argues, has been extremely rare throughout all but our most recent cultural history.
Kim Phillips-Fein
New York University
Visiting Scholar
2020 to 2021
Phillips-Fein will work on a book analyzing the various defenses of economic inequality advanced by American business leaders and economic writers who wrote accounts of capitalism for a wide public audience. Her historical narrative will explore the various ways members of the elite wrote about economic inequality, and the arguments they advanced in its defense. Among those profiled are Andrew Carnegie, Alfred P. Sloan, Henry Ford and Sam Walton.
Elizabeth Shermer
Loyola University Chicago
Visiting Scholar
2014 to 2015
Shermer will complete a book that examines the origins of the contemporary crisis in public higher education. She hypothesizes that contrary to popular belief, state universities have always been subject to market forces. Shermer finds that there was never enough government funding to create a geographically-uniform system of mass higher education, and that as a result, public universities have long been influenced by private sector interests.
Kirsten Swinth
Fordham University
Visiting Scholar
2021 to 2022
Kirsten Swinth will research and write the first history of the contemporary American “working family.” Her project will demonstrate how a surge in mothers’ paid labor since 1970 provoked a deep cultural crisis as it disrupted the long-held norm of a male breadwinner and female homemaker. She will explore how this major reordering of social relations forged a new normative family ideal even as gender and racial inequalities persisted and many challenged the new model. She will also investigate how the media, social scientists, and politicians helped shape this new ideal.
Camille Robcis
Columbia University
Visiting Scholar
2024 to 2025
Robcis will write a book exploring the arguments against so-called “gender ideology,” “gender theory,” or “gender agenda.” She will trace how critics came to perceive, and fight, “gender ideology” as responsible for the push for sexual and reproductive rights, from the legalization of abortion and access to contraception, to same-sex marriage, sexual education in schools, non-discrimination bills, access to new reproductive technologies, trans rights, and more.
Julian E. Zelizer
Princeton University
Visiting Scholar
2010 to 2011
Zelizer will complete a book manuscript on how President Lyndon Johnson, congressional Democrats, and their supporters were able to achieve the Great Society legislation within three years. The book will highlight multiple political forces that produced this intense period of domestic policymaking.