Seminar Series on the Institutions that Manage Violent Conflict

Craig Calhoun

"The Public Sphere and the Populist Imaginary"

Thursday, October 21, 2010
5:30 p.m.
180 Hagerty Hall
1770 College Road, Columbus, OH 43210

View event recording in Flash
View event recording in RealPlayer
View event recording in Windows Media

Craig Calhoun has been president of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) since 1999. He is also University Professor of the Social Sciences at New York University and founding director of its Institute for Public Knowledge.

Calhoun has written on culture and communication, technology and social change, social theory and politics, and on the social sciences themselves. His most recent books include Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (Routledge, 2007) and Cosmopolitanism and Belonging (Routledge, 2009), and the University of Chicago Press is publishing a collection of his historical essays, entitled The Roots of Radicalism. Calhoun recently edited two noteworthy collections: Sociology in America (Chicago, 2007) and Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power, with F. Cooper and K. Moore (New Press, 2006).

Throughout his career, Calhoun has been involved in projects bringing social science to bear on issues of public concern. These have ranged from consulting on rural education and development in North Carolina, to advising the Constitutional Commission of Eritrea, to helping develop communications infrastructure in Sudan. Most famously, he provided a detailed eyewitness account — and award-winning sociological analysis — of the student revolt in Tiananmen Square, in his most popular work to date, Neither Gods nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (California, 1994).

Co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute Public Sphere and Modern Social Imaginaries working group, with contributions from the departments of English, Germanic Languages and Literatures, History, Political Science, Spanish and Portuguese, and Women’s Studies.

Craig Calhoun
President
Social Science Research Council
University Professor of the Social Sciences
New York University