Bryant Simon, Temple University
Thursday, 18 October 2007, 4:00 P.M.
Memorial Union Lounge
Free and Open to the Public
The first lecture in the 2007-08 American Culture & Politics series, “Consuming Third Place: Starbucks and Illusion of Public Space,” will be given by Bryant Simon of Temple University on October 18, 2007, at 4:00 p.m. in the Memorial Union Lounge on the Oregon State University campus.
Borrowing from the popular sociologist Ray Oldenburg, Starbucks bills itself as a “third space,” a place between work and home for respite, socializing, and community building. Based on a thousand hours of watching and listening at hundreds of Starbucks, Bryant Simon’s talk will look at how Starbucks works on the ground. It will explore how people use the stores and how the company creates the appearance - without the substance - of a public space and what this means for our attempts to create connections and community.
Over the past three years, Dr. Simon has visited more than 400 Starbucks in eight countries and is currently working on a book to be published by Bloomsbury. This is not, however, just a study of Starbucks but an exploration of American life both in the States and abroad in the 21st century. His research explores the very desires of daily life as they are revealed on the comfy couches and in the drive-thru of Starbucks. As he looks at what it means to consume Starbucks, he also investigates what Starbucks consumes of us - our labor, our landscapes, and our politics.
Bryant Simon is a professor of history and the director of the American Studies Program at Temple University. He is the author of A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Textile Workers, 1910-1948 (1998) and Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America (2004) as well as co-editor, along with Jane Dailey and Glenda Gilmore, of Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (2000). His research on Atlantic City has earned awards from the Organization of American Historians, Urban History Association, and the New Jersey Historical Commission. He also serves as an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer.
Elizabeth Blackmar, Columbia University
Monday, 12 November 2008, 4:00 PM
Memorial Union, Journey Room
Above: Remains of the Homestead steel mills in
Homestead, PA, now the site of a shopping mall.
The United States famously has one of the highest rates of home ownership in the world. Even as the recent crisis in the mortgage market reminds us of how contingent that ownership is on credit, the very notion of “taking ownership” circulates as a popular metaphor for individual responsibility and maturity. In a corporate economy, however, ownership of all manner of resources has also been organized through financial instruments; for example, company stocks or shares in Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) or shares in mortgage pools. A long tradition of social criticism has charged that the “absentee ownership” created through such investments leads to the concentration of wealth and comes at the expense of individual responsibility and accountability. Advocates of such investments, however, celebrate them as a means of democratizing ownership of productive resources. This talk examines these debates in relation to the transformation of real estate development in the U.S. since 1945.
Elizabeth Blackmar is Professor of History at Columbia University. She is author of Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850, and co-author with Roy Rosenzweig of The Park and the People: A History of Central Park. She has recently published articles on Real Estate Investment Trusts, pension funds, and the ownership of shopping malls, and on the rhetoric of “commons” in contemporary political discourse.
Kathleen Brown, University of Pennsylvania
Monday, 19 May 2008, 4:00 P.M.
Memorial Union, Room 208
For nearly three centuries, many ordinary Europeans and Euro-Americans regarded bathing with suspicion, as an unhealthy and immoral practice. This reluctance to bathe emerged despite longstanding Judeo-Christian traditions that equated bodily cleanliness with spiritual purity and a vibrant medieval culture of bathing in public bath houses, private baths, and mineral springs. What happened to turn people against the bath? How and why did they become convinced, several centuries later, that bathing was not only not dangerous, but a key to good health and moral virtue?
This talk addresses these major shifts in the history of the body, with special attention to the role of cultures in contact in the early Atlantic and the subsequent transformation in women’s reputations for bodily cleanliness. By the middle of the nineteenth century, bathing had been reinstalled as a cornerstone of good health and hygiene. Middle-class women were newly defined by their responsibility for enforcing standards of cleanliness in their homes and for spreading this ethos to the homes of people too poor to claim the protections of privacy. Like practices of body care, the ideals for health that emerged in the nineteenth century reflected the new realities of urban life and a demanding, volatile, capitalist economy.
Kathleen Brown received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996) and Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (2008). She teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania.
William Leach, Columbia University
Memorial Union, Journey Room
THIS LECTURE HAS BEEN POSTPONED - PLEASE CHECK BACK IN FALL 2008.
