The Triangle Intellectual History Seminar is one of the premier institutions in the country for the study of intellectual history. For more than 25 years, the seminar has gathered together historians from around the country, and the world, to discuss texts in contexts, probing the intricate relations between intellectual practice, aesthetic imagination, and social reality. Our historic strength is in the intellectual history of the modern Atlantic world, focusing on political and economic thought. In recent years, the seminar has expanded to include the history of science, gender, empire, and international law. Like the discipline of intellectual history itself, the seminar continues to evolve.
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Upcoming Events
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Past Events
Abdul Basith BasheerThe “Global Muslim Journal” Across Three Continents: A Comparative Historical Study of Rida’s Al-Manar, Pickthall’s Islamic Culture, and Muhammad’s The Bilalian NewsThis paper… read more about Capper Fellows Abdul Basheer and Britt Edelen, and Daniel Orr »
In the twenty-first century, the ecological and social depredations of unbridled economic growth have become a matter of global public concern. Yet in the eighteenth century, the revolution in global… read more about Geneviève Rousselière: The Politics of Self-Destruction. Rousseau on Political Economy »
Abstract:The social sciences today are widely considered to be a branch of applied statistics, or, failing that, applied economics. To be sure, so-called ‘qualitative’ approaches still persist… read more about Joel Isaac: The Strange Sciences- Concepts, Facts, and a Forgotten Tradition in Modern Social Thought »
** Please note: This event has been changed to online only. ** Abstract:Khan's paper, Whither the Law of Nations? Between Extraterritorial Capitulations and Political Law, is an… read more about Adil Hasan Khan: Whither the Law of Nations? »
Abstract:Kamugisha will discuss his essay, which provides a meditation on the field of Caribbean intellectual history, outlining the contours of the field through a consideration of eight relatively… read more about Aaron Kamugisha: The Promise of Caribbean Intellectual History »
Abstract:Seventeenth-century London offered, for those who could afford it, a number of desirable commercial objects to satisfy what Eastward Ho! labels “ranging appetites,” from imported goods… read more about Astrid Giugni: Sophrosyne, Pleonexia and Urban Commerce in Eastward Ho! »
Rachel Suffern"Fitzgerald’s Folly: Comedy, Reality, and The Immigration Debate in The Great Gatsby"F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is considered by many to be “The Great… read more about Capper Fellows: Rachel Suffern & Wan-Ning Seah »
A discussion of the speaker's forthcoming book, "The Ends of Race: The Rise and Fall of a Concept, 1780-1900." The book traces the emergence, flourishing, and senescence of race as an object of… read more about The Ends of Race: The Rise and Fall of a Concept, 1780-1900 »
Every year, the TIHS ends with a discussion and celebration of the work of our Charles Capper Fellows in Intellectual History. Join us as we hear short presentations from this year’s magnificent crop… read more about TIHS: 2023 Charles Capper Fellows »
The classic concept of the body politic persists, however its alignment with organismic concepts of the state in modern times, especially under the Nazi regime, has diminished its contemporary impact… read more about TIHS with David Bates: "Organismic states: Political Physiology and the Emergence of Cybernetics" »
The idea that Asian Americans are treated as inassimilable aliens is at the core of Asian American Studies today. But it wasn't always so. From the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, Asian Americanists… read more about TIHS with Calvin Cheung-Miaw: "From Class Formation to Racial Formation: Marxism and Asian American Studies in the 1980s" »
In 1959, Frantz Fanon asked Ferhat Abbas, the President of the GPRA (Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic), to write a preface for L’an V de la révolution algérienne (published in English… read more about TIHS with Muriam Haleh Davis: The Absent Preface: Algerian Readings of Frantz Fanon after Independence »
Cambridge School contextualism is philosophical analysis turned against its historical myopia. Philosophical analysis has had many children. One of these is Cambridge School contextualism… read more about TIHS with David Weinstein: "Between Cambridge and Marburg" »
In 1774, Thomas Paine and other patriots argued that the American colonies should separate from Great Britain and become the “last asylum of liberty.” America would be an international haven for the… read more about TIHS with Stephanie DeGooyer: "The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Asylum" »
Today, it seems impossible to discuss historians’ encounter with poststructuralist theory, the ensuing triumphant surge of the “cultural turn,” and the establishment of what scholars have recently… read more about Anna Krylova, Foucault, Poststructuralism, and the Fixed “Openness of History” »
Every year, the TIHS ends with a discussion and celebration of the work of our Charles Capper Fellows in Intellectual History. Join us as we hear short presentations from this year’s magnificent crop… read more about Capper Presentation »
Nana Osei Quarshie is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine, with secondary appointments in the Section of the History of Medicine… read more about Thorazine and Terror: Pharmacotherapy for the African Personality »
Charles Troup is a third-year Ph.D. student in Modern European History at Yale University. He is currently preoccupied with the problem of how and why concepts and practices from the world of… read more about Governing and Economic Reason in Modern Britain »
Junko Takeda is a Professor of History at Syracuse University. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2006. Her current research and teaching interests include the histories of early… read more about Avedik, Louis XIV’s Armenian Prisoner: Confessional Conflict and Involuntary Movement in the Early Modern Mediterranean »
Jonas Gerlings is an intellectual historian whose research focuses on global Enlightenments in the Baltic Sea Region. Gerlings completed his PhD in Intellectual History on the German philosopher… read more about ‘Yet Another Brutality that We do not Need’: Kant and the Debate on Small-Pox Inoculation »
Julia Rudolph is a Professor of History at North Carolina State University. Her field of study is early modern Europe; within that field she has particular interests in legal history, gender history… read more about William Blackstone's Mortgage »
Christopher Cameron is a Professor of History at UNC-Charlotte, where he focuses on African American Religious and Intellectual History. He received his Ph.D. from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2010, and has… read more about Unitarians, Transcendentalists, and Abolitionism »
Lloyd Kramer is a longtime board member of the Triangle Intellectual History Seminar, and an expert in the intellectual, cultural, and political history of Europe and the United States since the… read more about Traveling to Unknown Places: Nineteenth-Century journeys toward French and American Selfhood »
