May 1-2, 2014

Class of 1978 Pavilion, Van Pelt Library, 6th floor

University of Pennsylvania

Free and open to the public

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Thursday, May 1

2:30 pm: Opening remarks and welcome
Allan Megill (University of Virginia), President of the Board of Directors

3:00-4:45 pm: Opening panel
Intellectual History: Trends and Prospects
Organizer and chair: Peter Gordon (Harvard University)

• “Historians, Climate Change, and the Problem of Scale” Deborah Coen (Barnard College)
• “What was ‘Context’? Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest (with apologies to Robert Dahl)” Joel Isaac (University of Cambridge)
• “What is a Transnational Context?” Edward Baring (Drew University)

5:00 pm: 2014 Lovejoy Lecture
“Historians and the Question of Secularization: The Case of the United States”
David Hollinger (University of California, Berkeley)

6:30 pm: catered reception, sponsored by the Department of History

Friday, May 2

10:00-11:45 am: Session I
Latest Methods in Reading Religious Texts
Organizer and chair: Steven Cassedy (University of California, San Diego)

• “From Religious Philosophy to Socialist Realism: The History of ‘Positive Aesthetics’ in Russia, 1894-1934” Robert Bird (University of Chicago)
• “On Women’s Bibles and the Bible’s Women: Feminism and Biblical Scholarship” Shawna Dolansky (Carleton University)
• “The Bible Alone: The Sola Scriptura Problem in the Study of American Evangelicalism” Molly Worthen (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

1:45-3:15 pm: Session II
Early Modern Philosophy and the Life Sciences, 1700-1800
Organizer and chair: Emily Grosholz (Pennsylvania State University)

• “Aristotle, Leibniz, and Kant on the Unity of Species” Justin Smith (Université de Paris VII, Denis Diderot)
• “Models and Methods in Early Modern Life Sciences” François Duchesneau (Université de Montréal)
• “Contingencies, Accidents, and Variability: Methodologies of Experimentation in Early Modern Studies of Life” Jutta Schickore (Indiana University, Bloomington)

3:30-5:15 pm: Session III
Intellectual History and Political Thought
Organizer and chair: Cary Nederman (Texas A&M University)

• “Venetian Stones, the Physical Res Publica, and Political Theory” Alexandra Hoerl (Wabash College)
• “Europe’s Dead Hand and ‘American’ Political Thought” J. S. Maloy (Oklahoma State University)
• “Situating Comparative Political Theory in the ‘Western’ Tradition of Political Theorizing” Takashi Shogimen (University of Otago)

5:15 pm: Closing remarks
Anthony Grafton (Princeton University)