Thomas Bender's Teaching and Research Interests
Research Interests:
My past research, and much of my present research, falls within the broad domain of intellectual and cultural history, but with more attention to social and institutional history than is usually the case. The period that interests me runs from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth.
I continue to write about intellectual, whether academic intellectuals or urban intellectuals, and modern urban culture is still a major focus for me as is the use of visual and spatial evidence in studying urban culture, most recently in The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (2002) I have focused a good deal in the past few years on the production of knowledge, in academic disciplines and in universities. Some of this work has focused on the disciplines, as in my co-editorship of American Academic Culture in Transformation (1998) and in terms of both the discipline of history (The Education of Historians for the Twenty-First Century [2004], Rethinking American History in a Global Age [2002]), and the field of urban studies, as in the co-edited Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City (2007). Much of this interest is reflected in another co-edited work, a documentary history of American higher education (American Higher Education Transformed, 1940-2000: Documenting the National Discourse (fall, 2007). Most recently, my interests have turned to transnational and comparative history. This is particularly reflected in A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (2006). More generally, forms of historical explanation and narrative strategies have long interested me, and my interest in them continue to frame much of my work—from my book, Community and Social Change in America (1978), to “Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History” (1986), to “Strategies of Narrative Synthesis in American History,” (2002), and “The Boundaries and Constituencies of History” (2006). At present I am writing an chapter for a volume on the history of national histories in every country, for which my topic is American historical writing and the nation from 1789 to 1945.
Teaching Interests:
My teaching interests largely parallel the interests noted above. I regularly teach a freshman honors seminar on “The Politics of Knowledge,” and this year I will be teaching a graduate course on “Modern City Culture.” I have begun teaching both a graduate course on transnational and global approaches to American history, as well as a graduate lecture course on the same theme. I sometimes teach the nineteenth century segment of the graduate sequence on “Literature of the Field: US.”
| |
