During the academic years 2010/11 and 2011/12, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies focused on problems of authority and legitimation. How have regimes of power been legitimated, sustained, and identified with realms of justice, the sacred, or the natural? How have cultures of consent and allegiance been created and maintained? Under what historical conditions have those cultures fractured or dissolved?
Topics Included:
- Political culture
- Religious, domestic, and social authority
- The rise of nationalist and civic cultures
- The symbolic construction of the authority of kings, chieftains, texts, and law
- The mobilization of religious and social movements
- The legitimation of empires and regimes of labor
- The naturalization of everyday forms of domestic power
- Challenges to authority in the form of delegitimation, resistance, withdrawal, or revolution
Davis Center Fellows
2010-2011
- Monica Black, University of Tennessee
- Sabrina Mervin, CNRS, Paris
- Mary S. Morgan, London School of Economics
- Mridu Rai, Trinity College, Dublin
- Rachel St. John, New York University
- Hugh Thomas, University of Miami
- Katherine Verdery, CUNY Graduate Center
- Eric D. Weitz, City College of New York
2011-2012
- Paul Friedland, Independent Scholar
- M. Cecelia Gaposchkin, Dartmouth University
- Doris Garraway, Northwestern University
- Polly Jones, University of Oxford
- Christine Philliou, Columbia University
- Jonathan Rieder, Barnard College
- Hilda Sabato, Universidad de Buenos Aires
- Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, University of Warsaw
Lawrence Stone Lectures
Kenneth Pomeranz, Why Is China So Big? (April 2010)
Ayesha Jalal, The Pity of Partition (April 2011)
