David Hollinger to deliver Curti Lectures

The spring Curti Lectures will be delivered March 27-29 by David A. Hollinger, professor of history at the University of California-Berkeley and currently a fellow of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton.

The lectures will be at 4 p.m. in the auditorium of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 816 State Street. Topics are:

• “The New Cosmopolitanism and the Old Enlightenment,” Monday, March 27.
• “Solidarity with Whom? The Case of the United States in the Era of Transnationalism,” Tuesday, March 28.
• “Solidarity with Whom? The Case of Universities Amid the Force Fields of Capital,” Wednesday, March 29.

Hollinger, perhaps the leading American intellectual historian of his generation, has functioned increasingly as a public intellectual through his books, essays, and reviews. Hollinger’s recent work, and the subject of his Curti lectures, addresses the nature of citizenship and cultural identity in contemporary America. His “Postethnic America,” an extended treatment of these issues in historical perspective, was widely reviewed and discussed.

He has explored on the history of pragmatism; the rise of social science; the role of public intellectuals like Walter Lippmann, Thomas H. Kuhn, and Richard Rorty; the history of science in America; the state of national history in an era of internationalism; and the status of the historical enterprise more generally in a postmodernist and deconstructionist era.

Hollinger’s books include “Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth Century American Intellectual History” (1996). Co-editor of a widely used anthology of primary sources, “The American Intellectual Tradition,” he also is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Curti Lectures honor Merle Curti (1897-1996), a distinguished American intellectual historian who taught for many years at UW–Madison.