American History Research Seminars 2025/26

List of American History Research Seminars at the RAI –  academic year 2025/26

21 October 2025:

The First American Federalism: The States and Congress before the Constitution

Grace Mallon (Oxford)

28 October 2025:

Talking Back to Thomas Jefferson: Early African American Responses to Thomas Jefferson

Mia Bay (Cambridge)

4 November 2025:

Christ, Church, and Country: Home Missions and the Religious Reconstruction of the United States, 1865-1900

Gwion Wyn Jones (Oxford)

12 November 2025:

Harmsworth Roundtable

Sarah Knott (Oxford), Grace Mallon (Oxford) and Andrew O'Shaughnessy (University of Virginia)

25 November 2025:

"A Deep Wound in the American Mind": Popular Politics and the aftermath of the Alien and Sedition Acts, 1798-1800

Connie Thomas (UCL)

2 December 2025:

Seward Family Values: Writing William Henry Seward from the Outside In

David Sim (UCL)

20 January 2026:

Reimagining Race in the US Military: Culture, Communication, and the Making of the Miami Experiment

Beth Bailey (University of Kansas)

27 January 2026:

Frauds We Are Yet But in Sight Of': Fighting Civil War Pension Fraud in Gilded Age America, 1884-1897

Rob Bates (Oxford)

3 February 2026:

From Americanism to Maga: redefining the bounds of citizenship

Anthea Butler (University of Pennsylvania) 

10 February 2026:

In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life

Regina Kunzel (Yale)

24 February 2026:

High Tech Gays v. D.I.S.C.O: Challenging the Straight State in the Corporate Sphere 

Josh Hollands (UCL)

3 March 2026:

Midshipmen Moralists: Jimmy Carter, H. Ross Perot, and the Enduring Mugwump Tradition

Bruce Schulman (Boston University)

10 March 2026:                   

"A Happy, Angry Man"? John Hope Franklin and the Dilemmas of Black History in Public

Tom Cryer (Oxford)