CURRENT RESEARCH

For much of the last decade, my research has revolved around a number of projects that address the relationship between the transformations of industrial liberalism and imperialism mostly, but not entirely, in the context of the United States. With the help of a SSHRC Standard Research Grant, I started work on a book with the provisional title The liberal imperium: the social construction of internationalism, 1890-1920. Very soon after that got started, however, I realized that its basic premises were transnational, that is to establish the intellectual and political-economic conditions of internationalism in the late 19th century and early 20th century. This work started with a series of "ground clearing" projects on U.S. progressive liberalism, including the effects of philosophical Pragmatism on a generation of scholars, public intellectuals, and activists who were attracted to its radical anti-essentialism and the effect that had on rejecting the "genteel tradition" of U.S. Victorian cultural elites, a tradition that underpinned complacent views on progress, race, gender roles, and evolution. These intellectual insurgents found allies across borders, and were part of a transnational intellectual rebellion that held the potential to introduce entire new categories of social thought, much of which had profound implications for international relations because they rejected the presumed logic of the nation-state itself. This insurgency of course had its limits during and after the First World War, but I started to look at the transnational communities of different forms of internationalism spanning the North Atlantic generally. These communities—including most famously the Second International—not only failed to stop by the collapse of international comity in 1914, but were inadvertently part of the social resurgence of nationalism that impelled the war itself.

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What unifies these disparate studies, of course, is an interrogation of competing concepts of humanity, struggling with what Siep Stuurman, in his massive new book The invention of humanity (2017), has called the tension between equality and cultural difference that 20th century globalism has, daily, brought sharply into focus. My research, looking at the sexual, racial, and economic transnational political communities that lay outside the circumference of the 19th century nation-state's concept of power and legitimacy, explores in this sense the emerging language of universal human rights avant la lettre through the transnational activism of women, socialists, academics, and anti-colonial agents who had to find a way of transforming their marginality without being dependent on the self-restricting language of the old regime.  

The projects on the following pages represent large or small parts of this project.