Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen is professor of history at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research and teaching focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the United States in transatlantic perspective. She is the author of American Nietzsche (2012), The Ideas that Made America (2019), and American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction (2020), and she has received numerous awards for her writing, including the Morris D Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history. Her historical essays and articles have appeared in academic journals as well as publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, The Guardian, American Scholar, Dissent, and Aeon, among others.
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
Merle Curti and Vilas Borghesi Distinguished Achievement Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Where Have All the Isms Gone?: On the Evolution of Knowledge
Not very long ago the History of Ideas had been organized according to movements within each field. In Anthropology, for example, Malinowski was associated with Functionalism, Levi-Strauss with Structuralism, etc. Post-structuralism and postmodernism each in their turn at first appeared as “the next big thing.” These terms are familiar to many of us today and have been... read more! »