Killing King Caucus

Guest post by Mark G. Schmeller

In this seemingly endless presidential primary season, each and every candidate has claimed “outsider” status, and attacked nearly every other rival as a creature of the party “establishment.” No title or distinction – Senator, Governor, First Lady, Secretary of State, sibling/brother of former presidents, celebrity billionaire – has been too great to discourage presidential aspirants from presenting their campaigns as bold insurgencies against the complacency and corruption of the powers that be.

While there is nothing especially novel about such populist self-fashioning, the extraordinary volume of groaning about “the establishment” in this campaign cycle has led some political observers to ask if the establishment is in fact in decline. Are the elected officials, elites, big donors, and special interests that have traditionally steered the party nomination process losing their influence? Have new forms of social media and activism trumped (sorry for that) the conventional reliance on grassroots electioneering and penthouse fundraising? Can party structures no longer contain the intensifying anger wrought by “negative partisanship” – in which positive support for the principles and policies of a party weigh less in the mind of the voter than loathing for the other party and its partisans?

Needless to say, these questions will have to wait for answers. But in the meantime, we can entertain some historical analogies. One especially dramatic example of a party establishment defeated comes to us from the presidential election of 1824, when anger over the nomination process shattered the Democratic-Republican Party. During President James Monroe’s two terms in office (1817-1825), national party competition had all but disappeared. The Federalist Party, discredited by its seeming disloyalty during the War of 1812, had been reduced to a small band of New England reactionaries, leaving Democratic-Republicans as the only viable national party. While the absence of partisan competition may have allowed for a brief “era of good feelings,” one-party rule raised a number of thorny political and constitutional questions. A party congressional caucus had traditionally selected party nominees for President and Vice-President. But with only one party caucus remaining, the Democratic-Republican “King Caucus” now appeared to have the uncontested and arguably unconstitutional power to select Monroe’s successor.

James Akin, Caucus curs in full yell, or a war whoop, to saddle on the people, a pappoose president (1824). General Andrew Jackson stands tall amidst a pack of dogs representing newspapers who supported the Congressional Caucus nominee William Crawford. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

King Caucus had been attacked before. When it chose Monroe over William Crawford of Georgia in 1816, Crawford supporters and many northerners complained that Virginians used it to maintain their lock on the White House. But King Caucus had its share of defenders, who maintained that congressmen could best ascertain the preferences of partisans in their districts and states. John Taylor of Caroline, the prolific theorist of Jeffersonian democracy, argued that the caucus discouraged faction. But should it “ever attempt to control public opinion instead of expressing it, their doings would have little influence in the nation other than to embitter party animosity and to sharpen the edge of political strife.”

In 1824, King Caucus appeared to be doing just that. Monroe had identified no clear successor (his Vice-President, Daniel Tompkins of New York, was an insolvent alcoholic). Three eminent national figures – General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, and Henry Clay of Kentucky intended to run regardless of what the caucus did, and their supporters assailed King Caucus as a vast conspiracy against the sovereignty of the people. Senator Rufus King, an Adams supporter, called it “a self-created central power … regulated by a sort of freemasonry, the sign and password of each at once placing the initiated in full confidence and communion with each other in all parts of the union.” Publisher Hezekiah Niles of Maryland, a Clay man, declared that “he would rather learn that the halls of Congress were converted into common brothels” than to see King Caucus convene within them.

Not surprisingly, the most intense attacks on King Caucus came from Jackson supporters, who began to organize popular local “conventions” for Old Hickory. Conventioneers carefully distinguished the caucus, a small and exclusive meeting of elites designed to direct public opinion, from the convention, an open meeting of the people designed to concentrate public opinion. The “period has surely arrived,” a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania convention declared, “when a president should be elected from the ranks of the people,” a president like Jackson, who came “pure, untrammeled, and unpledged, from the bosom of the people.” Such rhetoric solidified the outsider image of Jackson, a frontier military hero riding a wave of populist discontent unleashed by the financial panic of 1819.

All of this persuaded the great majority of congressmen to steer clear of the caucus. When it eventually met to nominate William Crawford, only 66 of 216 eligible members attended. King Caucus was dead.

Some observers heralded the killing of King Caucus as a triumph of public opinion over party machinery. But to more discerning political minds, it suggested that there could be no effective public opinion without party mechanisms that involved the ordinary voter, flattered his judgment, and fired his enthusiasm. The election of 1824 – and Jackson’s eventual triumph in 1828 – laid the groundwork for a “second party system” built upon precinct-by-precinct organization, popular conventions, and intense partisan feeling. Party establishments can be defeated; partisanship, not so much.

Mark G. Schmeller is an associate professor of history at Syracuse University. His latest book, Invisible Sovereign: Imagining Public Opinion from the Revolution to Reconstruction, examines the idea of public opinion and its transformation since the Revolutionary War.

Use promo code “HDPD” to receive a 30% discount when you order your copy of Invisible Sovereign.

 

 

 

 

Two local treasures head to the Library of Congress

JHU Press and the book-loving community in Baltimore are losing two treasured colleagues to the Library of Congress. We hate to see them go—but we’re thrilled for both of them and so proud of the extraordinary recognition their appointments represent. Becky Clark, JHUP’s talented and energetic director of marketing and institutional outreach, leaves us this week to become the LOC’s Director of Publishing. Carla Hayden, the widely-respected head of Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library, has been nominated by President Obama to become the 14^th Librarian of Congress.  We extend cheers and best wishes to these exceptional friends and colleagues as their careers take them down the Parkway to the nation’s capital.

Becky Clark has served for twelve years as JHUP’s director of marketing and institutional outreach, overseeing sales, promotion, publicity, rights, and digital publishing strategies for about 170 new books each year. Becky has been an invaluable colleague with a legendary work ethic informed by remarkable judgment, grace, and kindness. Before joining the Press in 2003, she held similar positions at the Brookings Institution Press, the New Republic, Counterpoint Press, and Moon Travel Handbooks.  She has been an adjunct faculty member in George Washington University’s Master of Professional Studies in Publishing program and a past president of Washington Book Publishers. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Association of American University Presses. In her new position at the Library of Congress, Becky will oversee a program of institutional publications, scholarly and trade books, and consumer products highlighting the Library’s world-famous collections.

Carla Hayden has been the CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore since 1993. Over the years, she and the Pratt staff have been gracious hosts to numerous JHUP authors for book talks, signings, and other programs. Most notably, Carla has been a champion of making Baltimore’s 22-branch library system a beacon of hope and possibility for the citizens of our city. Prior to joining the Pratt, she was Deputy Commissioner and Chief Librarian of the Chicago Public Library from 1991 to 1993. She was President of the American Library Association from 2003 to 2004 and has served as a member of the National Museum and Library Services Board since 2010. If confirmed by Congress, Carla would be the first woman and the first African-American to lead the LOC.

We are enormously proud and grateful as these two treasured friends and colleagues take up their duties at one of the nation’s greatest institutions, the 214-year-old Library of Congress.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Confronting Child Death

Late last year, the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth published a special issue which took a look at the thorny subject of child death. Kathleen Jones organized a discussion of young people and death at the 2013 conference for the Society for the History of Children and Youth, the sponsoring organization for the journal. This event drove the creation of the special issue. Jones, Associate Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at Virginia Tech, served as guest editor for the issue with Vassar College Associate Professor of History and Director of Victorian Studies Lydia Murdoch and Tamara Myers, Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. The trio provided collective answers for a Q&A session.

This issue emanated from 2013 conference panel. How gratifying is it to see some of that work published?

Immensely gratifying. For the seventh biennial meeting of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, we proposed a group of panels about child death. The conference theme, “Space,” shaped our panels – the papers explored the places of death, the ways that space and place of death shaped the cultural meanings attached to dead children. Publication gave us the opportunity to collect ideas from the conference papers, expand and develop them, and, most importantly, share them widely. The opportunity to publish them also reinforced for us how important, and yet still relatively understudied, the responses to the deaths of children are for the history of childhood. Death provides a cultural frame for the value attached to children. It’s a point Viviana Zelizer made so clear over thirty years ago in her discussion of life insurance for children (Pricing the Priceless Child, 1985) It’s a perspective that the journal publication now invites others to build from and add new understandings to in the future.

In the introduction, it was mentioned that response to the original panel was overwhelming. Why do you think that this area has so much interest?

As the history of childhood has developed in the last thirty years or so, the field has been shaped by questions about agency – questions about what role children played in the past, about what they experienced as they grew up, and about how adults interpreted those experiences and used childhood for political purposes. Getting away from seeing the child as “victim” or “object” has been a part of the rationale for the history of childhood and youth. The same perspective permeates new studies of child death. Earlier histories tended to focus on the question of whether parents developed affective bonds with children and mourned those who died in periods or places with high child mortality. Following Linda Pollock (Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900, 1983), numerous scholars have demonstrated that parents deeply mourned the death of children in the past, leading us to explore new types of questions. Whereas death has often been blended into a history of medicine and disease or the history of mourning rituals, the conference theme opened the possibility of exploring the political, social, cultural, and emotional issues associated with risk and death, whether the death of one or of many children. Historians have shown how adults used the threat of death to discipline the young, and how state interventions developed at moments of heightened awareness of child endangerment. At the same time, historians of child death have tracked the emotional loss attached to the death of a child and the ways death has been rendered meaningful for children as well as for adults at both a cultural and a personal level.

Interest was also generated because of child death’s contemporary relevance and our (western) perspective that any young death is premature and demands explication. While death in childhood is an unusual occurrence in many cultures in 2016, it is an all-too-prominent part in others where disease and violence relentlessly attack the young. Where growing into adulthood is the norm, representations of dead and dying children pull at heartstrings, making those images powerful tools for political agendas. Current interest in the history of child death can’t be divorced from the powerful imagery in these contrasting life experiences of children and their prospects for growing into adulthood.

How hard was it to choose what would end up in the journal issue?

Our goal for the issue was to include articles that looked at death in different times and places; we were fortunate to work with panelists who brought such diversity to the conference. In identifying a table of contents that would ensure an issue with broad appeal we also invited additional contributions – notably David Pomfret’s reflective essay on the state of the field. But the underlying theme in the issue was always one of meaning. When a child dies, how is that death explained? When many children die in similar circumstances, how and why are the deaths given a purpose? We think the articles in this collection demonstrate the historical contingency of answers to questions about how we understand and process child death and the ways child death shape the life experiences of children.

We also wanted to show with the issue how researchers are approaching issues of childhood and death from a variety of methodological perspectives. The essays in the volume defy easy categorization, blending methodologies from cultural and social history, oral history, visual arts and material culture, archival studies, and social work. Taken together, though, they suggest the many opportunities for further research on the history of child death.

What did you three learn from working on the issue?

One of most important takeaways from editing this issue is how little we know about the experience of and the meanings attached to child death. The articles here only begin to scratch the surface and leave us with more questions than answers: How did young people themselves understand death? What were the ways that death was made real to them? How did they weave the prospect of death into expectations of their adulthood? We are particularly interested in how answers to these questions changed over time, or in different contexts. For historians of childhood, the role children played in history may well be found in the ways they balanced the prospect of the future with the possibility of death.

How important will it be to revisit this topic in the future?

We hope the experiences of death in childhood and the meanings adults and children give to those experiences will be revisited often as we continue to write the history of children and youth. The articles in this issue remind us that even though death is our universal fate, how we die and how the living are affected by death cannot be captured by that one word. The meanings we attach to death are bounded by the many adjectives we call on to distinguish one death from another… violent death, self-inflicted death, accidental death, epidemic death, slow death from disease or neglect. The articles in this issue begin to address the complexity of this multifaceted word. We expect that scholars will build from these articles to explore the range of experiences, emotions, and meanings associated with child death, and show us the many ways the deaths of some children have shaped the lives of others.

Remembering Ralph Cohen

By Anne E. Bromley, UVA Today Associate

Longtime University of Virginia English professor Ralph Cohen, who founded the internationally known scholarly journal New Literary History, died Feb. 23 – his 99th birthday – in Charlottesville.

Cohen joined the UVA faculty in 1967 and retired 42 years later as William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of English. He founded New Literary History in 1969 as a new type of academic journal devoted to the role of theory in exploring literary and cultural questions.

UVA President Emeritus and University Professor John T. Casteen III, a colleague of Cohen’s in the English department, noted that the journal “has served a dual purpose: it has been both the touchstone for the community of scholars of literature within this one university and a global forum for wide-ranging scholarly discussion and debate among writers and critics in every place and of every persuasion.”

Ralph Cohen was honored in 2010 for founding and editing New Literary History for 40 years. (Photo courtesy of UVA Today)

The current New Literary History editor, Rita Felski, who now holds the William R. Kenan Jr. Professorship, took the helm from Cohen in 2009. He “transformed the field of literary studies, thanks to New Literary History, whose extraordinary impact resonated around the globe,” she said.

New Literary History, a quarterly published by Johns Hopkins University Press, was the first-ever journal of literary theory, raising challenging questions about the aims and purposes of literary studies, Felski said.

“It was followed by many other journals of a similar kind,” she said. “It has a huge international reputation and put UVA on the map in many ways.”

W.J.T. Mitchell, the editor of one of those other journals, Critical Inquiry, called Cohen “the father of criticism and theory in our time.”

Through translations into English, often for the first time, the journal introduced numerous thinkers from France, Eastern Europe, China and elsewhere to an Anglo-American academic audience. In turn, New Literary History became the first English-language literary journal to be translated into Chinese.

Specializing in 18th-century British literature and philosophy – though his intellectual reach ranged well beyond British literary studies – Cohen developed an original theory of genre that connected literary theory with analysis of historical change across the disciplines. He published six books and more than 100 essays.

In keeping with his scholarly interests, he created the Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change, which operated from 1988 to 1995. This interdisciplinary research center, Cohen wrote, “had as its primary aim the study of change and continuity in individuals and institutions in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences.”

During the same time period, Cohen served as the first chair of the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes.

A fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1984) and the British Academy (since 1987), Cohen received numerous fellowships and scholarly awards and was visiting professor at universities across the United States and around the world.

For more than 60 years, he was a professor of English and considered himself first and foremost a teacher. Before coming to the University of Virginia, he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles for 17 years.

After retiring from UVA, he joined James Madison University’s School of Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication and helped establish the Cohen Center for the Study of Technological Humanism in 2013.

Cohen graduated from the City College of New York in 1937, received his master’s degree from Columbia’s Teachers College in 1946, taught at CCNY from 1947 to 1950 and earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1952. He served in the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps from 1942 to 1946. Before the war, he met and married Libby Okun, his wife of more than 70 years. She died in 2013.

Cohen is survived by his daughter, Ruth; and son-in-law, David B. Morris; and son David and daughter-in-law, Mary Cohen, all of Charlottesville.

A memorial event will be held on UVA’s Grounds later this year.

Reprinted with permission from UVA Today

Don’t miss the reading by John Irwin & Wyatt Prunty on Thursday, February 25

The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars will host a reading by two long-time friends and JHU Press authors, John Irwin and Wyatt Prunty, on Thursday, February 25, at 6:30 p.m.  The reading, reception, and book signing take place in Gilman Hall, Room 50, on JHU’s Homewood campus.  The event is free and open to the public; find more information on the Writing Seminars website.

John Irwin has been an extraordinary friend and partner to JHU Press over many decades, publishing six scholarly books with us under his own name; three volumes of poetry under his pen name, John Bricuth; editing some 97 volumes in the distinguished series, Johns Hopkins: Poetry & Fiction, on behalf of the Press and the Writing Seminars; relaunching the literary journal, The Hopkins Review, in 2008; and serving as the intrepid cheer-leader, fundraiser, and inspiration for all these projects.  We extend boundless thanks and good wishes to John, who retired last year as Decker Professor of the Humanities at JHU.  He will be reading from and signing copies of his (John Bricuth’s) latest volume of poetry, Pure Products of America. Inc.

Wyatt Prunty is a professor of English at Sewanee: The University of the South and the founding director of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He is the author of nine collections of poems (eight published with JHUP), including Unarmed and DANGEROUS and The Lover’s Guide to Trapping. He will be reading from and signing copies his  latest collection from JHUP, Couldn’t Prove, Had to Promise.

 

 

 

 

Other Althussers

Twenty-five years after his death and just two years shy of the centenary of his birth, research into the work of Louis Althusser flourishes, unveiling a more complicated and contentious author than his reputation as a French Communist Party philosopher ever allowed. The journal diacritics recently published a special issue focused on Althusser. Guest editors Jason Barker and G. M. Goshgarian joined us for a Q&A on the issue and Althusser’s work.

How did this special issue come about?

JB: I had submitted an article on Althusser for inclusion in a general issue. In the meantime G. M. Goshgarian (Michael) happened to mention that he would probably be trans­lating Initiation à la philosophie pour les non-philosophes (Puf, 2014; translated as Philoso­phy for Non-Philosophers, due out in 2016) for Bloomsbury, and wondered whether diacritics would be interested in running an excerpt. Initially the plan was to run one chapter from Initiation. However, it took so long to obtain pre-publication rights from Bloomsbury that, in the interim, Bloomsbury had obtained translation rights to Être marxiste en philosophie (Puf 2015; How to Be a Marxist in Philosophy, due out in 2017) as well. At that point we agreed it would be preferable to include extracts from both books, along with Michael’s editor’s preface to the French edition of Être marxiste. diacritics were very supportive of the idea.

How do you think Philosophy for Non-Philosophers and Être marxiste en philosophie might change common perceptions of Althusser? 

JB: The reception of any author’s posthumous work is always going to be subject to contingent factors beyond his control. There are things that are especially stimulating in these two works from the mid-1970s, due to the forty-year time lag involved. Had they by some minor miracle appeared during Althusser’s lifetime then one imagines that their impact would have been less dramatic. This is all especially interesting because contingency emerges as a central concern of Althusser’s in his posthumously published works of the 1980s, as well as in these books of the 1970s. In them he is trying to think contingency as a category of materialist philosophy. Obviously this rather contradicts the impression we have of Althusser as a deterministic Marxist philosopher who was also a lifelong member of the French Communist Party.

Do you think Althusser would have shared the assessment of his philosophy and its overall evolution that you make in the special issue? Can you say a little about your assessment?

GMG: Probably, if my assessment is right. For the last decade, I’ve been rather monotonously suggesting that the “late-Althusserian” materialism of the encounter is a reprise and refinement of the “theory of the encounter” that Althusser sketched in 1966-67 on the basis of an idea worked up in his first book, the 1959 Montesquieu: the idea that nothing short of the necessarily contingent encounter of revolution can abolish the transitory eternity of one class dictatorship and ring in the transitory eternity of another. Althusser insisted on that idea from 1959 on, harping on his currently unfashionable, if not currently incomprehensible claim that Marx’s main contribution to thought is the concept of the necessity of proletarian dictatorship. He developed it in what may be his own main contribution to thought, a theory of the way the subject of class dictatorship, specifically bourgeois class dictatorship, emerges as the effect of an encounter between the individual and contingent combinations of various ideological state apparatuses, an encounter its victim experiences as “interpellation.” Besides a theory of revolution and a theory of the subject, the idea of the encounter also commanded a theory, patterned after Engels’ and Lenin’s idea of a proletarian “non-state,” of philosophy as self-deconstructive non-philosophy. Althusser began to work it out in the late 1950s, dropped it in his theoreticist period, took it up again in mid-1966, and elaborated it, to mention only what’s been published so far, in his 1971-72 course on Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Rousseau and in Philosophy for Non-Philosophers and Être marxiste. It might be called an application of the theory of the encounter to the philosophy of the encounter. It has obvious affinities to Derridean deconstruction that Derrida, in his 1974-76 s seminars on Althusser, chose to ignore.

Would you say something about the translation of Philosophy for Non-Philosophers and Être marxiste en philosophie?

GMG: Do you mean the English translations? I recently finished an English version of Philosophy for Non-Philosophers and hope to be correcting the proofs soon. I’m working on the English translation of Être marxiste now. There are nine more translations of the first book on the way or already out, in all the major Romance languages (the Italian and Spanish translations were both released in the past few months) and also in Arabic, Greek, German, Korean, and Turkish. As for Être marxiste, I know that the Japanese translation is pretty much under wraps and I’m told that there are eight more translations coming, one of them from the People’s Republic of China. Althusser is back on the map.

How did you decide who to invite to contribute to the special issue?

JB: Michael and I commissioned essays from Warren Montag and Alberto Toscano. The aim was that each of the contributions should support the Althusser excerpts thematically by revealing an “unusual” or unexpected side of his work. Hence “Other Althussers.” I hope we succeeded in this.

There is a defining emphasis on “non-Marxist” themes in the Althusser excerpts. Was that also intentional?

JB: That emphasis exists in both Philosophy for Non-Philosophers and Être marxiste en philosophie, which are books exploring the difficulty of being a Marxist and a philosopher at the same time. Althusser attempts to resolve or unravel the difficulty by taking one of his so-called detours through the history of philosophy, and ultimately asking where the detour leads a Marxist. For Althusser, the answer is not Marxist philosophy, but “non-philosophy.” This is particularly pertinent in light of the contemporary trend, which is something of a reprise from the France of the 1950s and 1960s, away from the institutional discipline and domination of philosophy, toward non-philosophical discourses, whether they be scientific, political, ethical, artistic, and so on. The question that remains, which Alberto Toscano touches on in his essay, is the extent to which these non-philosophical discourses can any more hope to be “condi­tions” of Marxism than philosophy can. Is it still possible to be a Marxist with or without philosophy? I think this is the question that runs through these two new Althusser books.

Lyme Disease update: A second deer tick microbe causes Lyme in North America

Guest post by Alan Barbour, MD

(With Lyme disease on the move and in news, we invited Lyme Disease author Dr. Alan Barbour to contribute regular updates to the JHU Press blog. His posts will highlight the latest findings on Lyme and other deer tick-associated infections and share insights on diagnosis, treatment, and prevention that are reported in the medical literature and other sources. For more frequent short updates and tips, follow Dr. Barbour on Twitter: @alanbarbour.)

From the time of our discovery of it in 1981 and for the next 34 years, B. burgdorferi was the only known cause of Lyme disease in North America. That’s no longer the case. A second species–named B. mayonii after Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic–has been identified as a human pathogen in patients in the upper Midwest. In Europe and Asia, a more complicated situation has been the norm for many years. Besides B. burgdorferi, three other species cause Lyme disease on the Eurasian continent. As discussed in the book, this is of more than academic interest because the two most common Eurasian species, B. afzelii and B. garinii, differ in important ways. Both are transmitted by ticks, but B. afzelii more commonly has a rodent as a carrier, while B. garinii has a greater predeliction for birds. In addition, B. garinii is more associated with invasion of the nervous system while B. afzelii is more likely to be confined in its manifestations to the skin. In comparison to those two species, B. burgdorferi more commonly results in arthritis in infected people.

There is only one medical journal article to date about B. mayonii in humans, so there is still much to be learned. But so far, there is evidence that B. mayonii may achieve higher levels of bacteria than B. burgdorferi in the blood during infection. This may be associated with a higher frequency of multiple skin rashes and a greater likelihood of hospitalization. The report focused on cases from the upper midwestern United States. In this region B. mayonii was identified in deer ticks, but it was less common than B. burgdorferi in ticks collected at the same locations and time. Whether B. mayonii occurs in other parts of the United States or Canada is not yet known.

Effective antibiotic treatment of Lyme disease caused by B. mayonii probably will not differ from treating disease caused by B. burgdorferi. But the discovery of a second Lyme disease species may cause a re-evaluation of some diagnostic assays. There may be enough differences between the two bacteria that an antibody test that solely uses B. burgdorferi cells as the target for the patient’s antibodies may have somewhat lower sensitivity when the patient has been infected with B. mayonii.

Since both B. mayonii and B. burgdorferi are carried by the deer tick Ixodes scapularis, the effective measures for reducing the risk of tick bites (which are described in the book) should suffice for protection against both pathogens. A possible exception among prevention options may be canine Lyme disease vaccines that are based on B. burgdorferi or one of its purified protein. Whether there is cross-protection is not known.

Alan G. Barbour, MD, is a professor of medicine and microbiology at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, a co-discoverer of the cause of Lyme disease, and a leading Lyme disease researcher. He is the author of Lyme Disease: Why It’s Spreading, How It Makes You Sick, and What to Do about It.

 

An Examination of Diagnosis

At first glance, medical diagnosis might seem like a cut-and-dry topic. However, much more goes into this aspect of medical practice than most people think. Annemarie Jutel, co-editor of Social Issues in Diagnosis and author of Putting a Name to It, recently served as guest editor for an issue of the journal Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. The first issue of Volume 58 took a special look at diagnosis through a combination of traditional articles, 55-word stories and images. Jutel, a professor in the Graduate School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, Jutel joined our podcast series to talk about diagnosis and the special issue.

Practicing Women’s Studies in the Corporate University

Nine essays and a roundtable discussion provided the content for the recent special issue of Feminist Formations on “Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women’s Studies in the Corporate University.” The issue sought to give women’s studies practitioners a chance to analyze, document, and theorize on this moment in women’s studies’ history. Guest editors Jennifer C. Nash and Emily A. Owens joined us for a Q&A about the special issue.

How did this special issue come together?

We are both scholars with intellectual, political, and pedagogical investments in women’s studies.  We have also come of age – in many ways – in the discipline (we both pursued undergraduate degrees in the field; Emily pursued a secondary field in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in graduate school, Jennifer teaches in a Women’s Studies program)  and we have watched the discipline change, evolve, and morph. Here, we are talking not simply about the “name changes” that many programs and departments went through in the 1990’s, name changes which purportedly signaled the field’s expansiveness and inclusivity. We are talking about other changes as well – the emergence of graduate certificate programs, the push toward women’s studies’ departmental status, the adoption of intersectionality as the field’s core analytic, to name a few. We were interested in thinking about these developments alongside the changes in the university that some have described as the “corporatization” of the university.  How has a relatively precarious space like women’s studies navigated its institutional precarity? How do we understand the field’s will-to-institutionalization? How might we theorize the simultaneous pleasure and violence of institutionalization? What are the particular forms that feminist institutionalization takes?

How important was it for you to hunt for deeper questions in this area?

It was extremely important to us to incorporate a sense of complexity around the practice of women’s studies in this moment. Pleasure features centrally in both of our first projects, and through that work we have learned about the complexities of pleasure—the ways that pleasure can, and often does, intersect with negative affective experiences like pain, trauma, violence. We wanted this special issue to capture the affective range, and contradictions, that are part of practicing women’s studies in the now. A central concern of the special issue is the “partial institutionalization” of women’s studies, which we use to try to capture the kind of in-between-ness of the interdiscipline. It is at once a site of liberation, of community, of belonging, and of normative notions of institutional progress and success, but it is also fraught—a site of outside-ness, of complex politics of race and sexuality, or national boundaries. We knew the questions in this issue would be more fruitful if they could get at all of that, instead of writing a simple narrative of triumph or decline.

How important was the collaboration that developed from the people involved in this issue?

We were so impressed by, and maybe also a little surprised by, the extent to which collaboration became a central part of this special issue. The issue includes many collaboratively written manuscripts, which experiment with traditional forms of academic writing. This allowed us to bring many perspectives into the issue, and also meant that, in the case of some articles, voice could shift to include both scholarly prose and more a conversational tone. This brought variety to the issue in exciting ways. We also facilitated the graduate student roundtable in this issue as a collaborative space, because it was important to us to have graduate student perspectives in the volume; the roundtable was shared across the group several times, which lent a conversational aspect to the piece.

On that note, our own collaboration has been a really important part of this project. This project came together through daily emails, phone calls, Skype dates; through cross-rank co-operation; through co-writing and intellectual generosity; and through friendship. In the midst of considering the challenges associated with doing women’s studies in this moment, our own collaboration became a sort of beacon that pushed back against the isolation and outside-ness that can mark the experiences of feminist intellectuals in the academy. Collaboration, then, is not coincidental to this issue, but is part of the methodology of this project.

What did you learn about the variety of experiences from contributing authors?

We often imagined the articles in the special issue to provide a kind of “thick description” (to borrow from Geertz) of institutional life in women’s studies, to offer ethnographic richness about the daily practice of feminist work – teaching, research, mentoring, administration. The articles in the volume cover a lot of terrain including intersectionality and its discontents, the politics of diversity, the place of adjunct labor in women’s studies, the racial and sexual politics of the classroom, and the like.  The wide array of questions that the issue takes on reveal, we think, how profoundly the question of institutionalization is shaping feminist academic life.

What kind of reaction do you hope to get from this issue?

We hope to spark critical conversations about institutionalization that move beyond either lamenting the violence of institutionalization or celebrating the field’s imagined resistance, and that instead contend with our complicated partial institutionalization and the varieties of feelings it engenders.  We aspire to foreground the affective life of institutionalization, underscoring how it works on our bodies; our conceptions of our selves; and our relationships to our work, our colleagues, our students.  We think that this approach – one that is interested in how institutional life feels – will help those of us who labor in the field think about women’s studies peculiar location in the academy, and feminist scholars’ peculiar location in the academy – with new complexity.  Finally, we are both excited by the volume of collaborative work that the issue yielded.  We see collaboration as a practice of radical friendship and feminist camaraderie that challenges the ethics of competition and scarcity that mark the contemporary academy.

First Folio, the book that gave us Shakespeare: On tour from the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2016

Guest post by Stephen H.Grant

Johns Hopkins University Press released Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger on the Ides of March in 2014, the 450th anniversary of the Bard’s birth.  In 2016, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the most famous and valuable Shakespeare volume––the 1623 First Folio––is on tour to all 50 American states plus Washington DC and Puerto Rico.  Eighteen of the 82 copies of the First Folio that Henry Folger purchased are traveling. The institutional hosts were selected after a competitive process marked by 140 inquiries, 101 completed applications, and winning proposals from 23 museums, 20 universities, five public libraries, three historical societies, and one theater. The University of Notre Dame in Indiana opened the First Folio tour on January 4, 2016 and The Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee will close the tour on January 2, 2017. This link to the Folger gives the information about where and when the rare volume will be displayed.

The tour is an ambitious, complicated, and unprecedented project, made possible in part through the sponsorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Google.org. The Folger Library’s partners in organizing it are the Cincinnati Museum Center and the American Library Association.

A 1623 Shakespeare First Folio open to the title-page and Ben Jonson’s preface.

What is a folio? The word “folio” is a printer’s term, referring to the size of the page, approximately 9 by 13 inches. (A folio-size paper folded in half, is called a “quarto.”) When Shakespeare’s plays were printed individually, they appeared in quarto. When all his plays were posthumously published, they appeared in folio. The First Folio of 1623 is the sole source for half of Shakespeare’s dramatic production. Eighteen of his plays (including Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, and As You Like It) had never been printed before and would probably be unknown today without this early compilation. They were offered to the public unbound, with pages uncut. Due to the large-size format of the volume, and the quality of the handmade sheets of rag paper imported from northern France, the sales price was high for the times. While attending the play cost one shilling six pence; the cost of this prestigious book was one pound (twenty shillings), or the equivalent of buying forty loaves of bread. By comparison, Sotheby’s in London sold a First Folio in 2006 for 2.8 million pounds, or the equivalent of buying 125 new automobiles.

A 1623 Shakespeare First Folio open to the Hamlet soliloquy, “To be or not to be.” At every location on the tour, the First Folio will be open to this page.

The First Folio is the most coveted secular book in the English language and one of the most important books in the world. Shakespearean scholars consider it to be the most authentic version of the Bard’s dramatic output. The original print run was about 750 copies. Only 233 copies of the First Folio are known to exist today. Why did Mr. Folger seek to acquire as many copies as he could? Every hand-printed book is unique. In the 17th century, with hand-set type, sometimes a letter wore out and was replaced. Spelling was not standardized. As many as nine typesetters or compositors worked on the First Folio in the printing shop with idiosyncrasies such that experts can identify which compositor worked on which copy. Many of the copies have marginalia (words, phrases, poems, drawings) added in the margins by avid readers over the centuries. Some assertive readers considered that they could improve upon the Bard’s English and crossed out his words and inserted their own!

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STEVE’S FIRST FOLIO TOUR

I will next report on the First Folio tour after speaking at two events in Santa Fe later this month. My major Folger talks for the remainder of this year are:

New Mexico Museum of Art Talk Friday, Feb. 19, 2016 at 2 PM
http://media.museumofnewmexico.org/events.php?action=detail&eventID=2685

Reception by Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library, Feb. 20, 2016 5:30 – 7:30 PM
http://www.santafelibraryfriends.org/SpecialEvents.html

Stanford University Book Store Talk Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2016 at 6 PM
https://events.stanford.edu/events/572/57263/

Marin County Book Passage Talk Thursday, Feb. 25, 2016 at 7:00 PM
http://www.bookpassage.com/event/stephen-grant-collecting-shakespeare

The Homestead, Hot Springs, Va. Talk Saturday, Mar. 12 at 4 PM
http://www.omnihotels.com/hotels/homestead-virginia/things-to-do/event-calendar?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D117806472

San Diego Public Library Talk Wednesday, June 22, 2016 at 6:30 PM
330 Park Blvd
San Diego, CA 92101

San Francisco Public Library Talk Thursday, June 23, 2016 at 6 PM
Main Library Koret Auditorium, 100 Larkin St.
San Francisco, CA 94102

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Stephen H. Grant is the author of Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. He is a senior fellow at the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and the author of Peter Strickland: New London Shipmaster, Boston Merchant, First Consul to Senegal.

Use promo code “HDPD” to receive a 30% discount when you order your copy of Collecting Shakespeare.