It is with great excitement that we announce a new direction for JHIBlog—or, that is, several new directions. Beginning this month, several contributing editors have agreed to join us and broaden the website’s historical scope and depth. This will entail more than just a broader base of expertise, we hope. Rather, a larger masthead will better reflect the mission of the Journal of the History of Ideas in terms of bringing disparate scholarly communities into closer dialogue with one another. Scholars of all stripes all stand to learn from one another in terms of historiography, advances in scholarship, and resources and texts crossing periods, fields, and regions. It is our hope that this is only the beginning of both increased content and increased ability to speak to a larger audience of historians and beyond.
Without further ado then, it is our pleasure to introduce our first contributing editors in their own words:
Daniel London: Jersey-Born, Gotham based. My main research interests revolve around urbanization, public policy, and concepts of “the public” and “interdependence” in the late 19th and early 20th century North Atlantic. I’ve written about the class politics of bicycles, the political economy of post-war urban tourism, labor politics in the 1939 New York World’s Fair, notions of “public space” in the works of John Dewey, and the political effects of urban decentralization on Tammany Hall. I received my Masters at the CUNY Graduate Center, and am now pursuing my Ph.D at New York University.
Brooke Sylvia Palmieri is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at University College London. Her current project details the archival and publication habits of Quakers in late seventeenth-century England — specifically, how their highly collaborative methods of printing made it possible to spread their ideas in England and across the Atlantic. More broadly, she is interested in the role of publication in building communities.
Jake Purcell is getting his PhD in early medieval history at Columbia University. He studies the production of facts within medieval legal and religious institutions, and especially the administrative and documentary practices surrounding relics in France and Germany. In addition to his fondness for the old science of diplomatics, Jake’s academic interests include the literary analysis of formulaic language; medieval ideas about authenticity, evidence, proof, and truth; and the relationship between legal and religious cultures.
Erin McGuirl is the Special Collections Librarian at the New York Society Library, the oldest Library in New York City.
Carolyn Taratko is a PhD candidate at Vanderbilt University, where she studies Modern European history. Her research focuses on the reconceptualization of the German countryside in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is particularly interested in the interaction between ideas about the economy and the natural world.
Please note that submissions from guest contributors are still encouraged: anyone is welcome to send a pitch to blogjhi@gmail.com, or to contact one of the editors directly. Should you wish to contact any of the primary or contributing editors, please write to this address, and we’ll forward your message along to the correct individual. We look forward to hearing from you as readers, writers, and colleagues. With thanks and the promise of more to come,
Madeline, John, and Emily