Taylor Spence
My dissertation entitled The Liberal Schoolmaster: Rebellion and Rights in the Northern Borderland, 1791-1846, looks at the way that the rising tide of liberalism in North America promoted aggressive social action on the part of people and eventually the state. It argues that liberalism, here defined as a broad cultural nexus of beliefs about rights, the land, society, and the nation, should be acknowledged as a major partner with the antebellum state in the process of continental expansion.
In August, the Western Historical Quarterly will publish my article Jeffersonian Jews: The Jewish Agrarian Diaspora and the Assimilative Power of the Western Land, 1882-1930 that is part of a larger study that looks at something I am calling the Jewish Agrarian Diaspora and how an inherited culture of Jewish agrarianism functioned to aid the US and Canadian states in their projects of expansion.
I was the co-chair of a graduate student symposium on the digital humanities called The Past's Digital Presence: Database, Archive, and Knowledge Work in the Humanities which took place February 19-20, 2010, which brought together graduate students and eminent scholars such as Peter Stallybrass, Jacqueline Goldsby, Willard McCarty, and Edward Ayers to take stock of the digital revolution and our work as humanists. Our website http://digitalhumnities.yale.edu/pdp has podcasts and videos of the event. We are also on Facebook (The Past's Digital Presence) and Twitter (#pdp2010).
Orals Fields:
American Frontiers and Borderlands (John Mack Faragher)
US History from 16th c through Reconstruction (David Blight)
Modern Latin American Social and Political History (Gilbert Joseph)
CV at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorspencephd
When applying, I benefited from contacting my Yale colleagues, so feel free to email me with any questions you may have about history at Yale. Also, you can see paintings (my real profession!) at: www.taylorwyoming.com.
