Toward an Intellectual History of “Ordinary Americans”
“Citizens and Social Knowledge”
Tuesday February 12 2007, 4pm, Ingraham 206
“Privacy as a Political Value”
Wednesday February 13 2007, 4pm, Ingraham 206
Public Seminar
Thursday February 14 2007, 12:20pm, 8108 Social Sciences
Co-sponsored by the UW Global Studies Program
SARAH E. IGO (Ph.D. History, Princeton University) is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. An intellectual and cultural historian of the twentieth-century United States, she has gravitated toward questions related to the history and sociology of knowledge. Her first book, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Harvard University Press, 2007) explores the relationship between survey data—opinion polls, sex surveys, consumer research—and modern understandings of self and nation. Igo was the recipient of the 2006 President’s Book Award of the Social Science History Association and has held fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Whiting Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. Igo is currently at work on a cultural history of modern privacy, examined through legal statutes, technological innovations, professional codes, and re-imaginings of domestic life. She received her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University in 2001.
Readings:
Igo, Sarah. (2005) From Main Street to Mainstream: Middletown, Muncie, and ‘Typical America’. Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 3, p. 239-266.
Igo, Sarah. The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007.