Save the date for the 11th Annual John Patrick Diggins Conference.

In honor of the 40th anniversary of Professor Diggins’ landmark works, The Lost Soul of American Politics and “The Oyster and the Pearl: The Problem of Contextualism in Intellectual History,” the Ph.D. Program in History at the CUNY Graduate Center will host a one-day conference on the theme of origins as a problem in intellectual history and for historians more broadly. The day long conference will be held at the Graduate Center on April 4 and 5, 2024.

In recent years, origins have become newly controversial among historians and in the public sphere – in battles over the relevance and meaning of first or founding moments, of “originalism” as a mode of constitutional argument, and in renewed debate about what “presentism” is and when it is or is not a problem. Yet for intellectual historians,  questions of origin are, if anything, fundamental to the enterprise of investigating how ideas matter in history. In other words, whether stated or not, establishing intellectual  origins has often been a central work that intellectual historians do for each other and for historical narratives of many kinds. How are historians thinking about ideas in relation to origins now? Does this vary across geographical and temporal fields, and in different traditions and different objects of inquiry, and why? Do origins stories still hold out special promise, duties, or opportunities for intellectual history? What role have origins stories, and ways of analyzing them, played in the continuing evolution of boundaries between history and other disciplines when it comes to scholarship about ideas in the past and present? More details coming soon!

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