Research

Research Interests

  • Franz Boas
  • History of anthropology
  • History of American social thought
  • Cosmopolitanism
  • Uses of history in wartime

Franz BoasMargaretMead JAddamsPeace DuBoisphoto

My research focuses on Franz Boas and the history of anthropology. I am interested in the interaction between individual biography and historical change. A German Jewish immigrant to the United States, Boas formulated anthropology as a project that extended and transformed ideas about culture, race and language. As the founder of academic anthropology, Boas built an intellectual empire by teaching a generation of graduate students (including Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead) and positioning them in new anthropology departments throughout the U.S. He also emerged as one of the most influential opponents of scientific racism, an influence that extended beyond the academy. My work examines the forces that shaped Boas as a man and as a public intellectual and that, in turn, gave him the opportunity to fight for social justice, against racism and against nationalism.

I am also beginning a new project that emerges from my course on war and society in the U.S. This project examines the uses of history, in particular historical analogies and the “lessons of history” in wartime. We are probably most familiar with this today in terms of the references to and deployment of “Vietnam” in discussions about the war in Iraq. What do these references tell us about how history works in the present? How is historical memory generated in times of political crisis? To some extent, these are political exercises designed to generate support through association with the past. But they also create our sense of history itself, what it has to teach us about the present as well as the past.

Selected publications are listed below. You can also access my complete CV here.

Selected Publications

“Franz Boas on War and Empire: The Making of a Public Intellectual,” in Regna Darnell, ed. Franz Boas: Ethnographer, Theorist, Activist, Public Intellectual (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), forthcoming, 2015.

“Biography, Art , Culture,” Review essay,  Reviews in American History 39 (March 2011): 140-148.

Review essay, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Rethinking History 13 (September 2009): 419-431.

“Anthropology and Ethnology,” Dictionary of American History, 3rd Edition, vol. I, ed. Stanley I. Kutler (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003)

“Anthropology and Cultural Relativism,” Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, vol. II, ed. Mary Kupiec Clayton and Peter W. Williams (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001)

“Diasporic Identities: The Science and Politics of Race in the Work of Franz Boas and W.E.B. Du Bois, 1894-1919” Cultural Anthropology 13 (May 1998):1-40

“German Culture and German Science in the Bildung of Franz Boas,” in “Volksgeist” as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Anthropology and the German Anthropological Tradition, History of Anthropology, vol. 8, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1996)

“Patterns of Strangeness: Franz Boas, Modernism and the Origins of Anthropology,” in Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, ed. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995)

A Companion to American Thought, (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1995). S.v. “Benedict, Ruth,” “Boas, Franz,” “Mead, Margaret”

“The Contours of Crime Prevention in August Vollmer’s Berkeley,” with Steven Schlossman, in Research in Law, Deviance and Social Control, vol. 6, ed. Andrew Scull and Stephen Spitzer (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1984)