Categoriearchief: Geen categorie

  Many thanks to Maaike Warnaar and Tjerk Jan Schuitmaker for taking these and many other beautiful pictures, and to everyone in them for being there! Happy holidays!  

I don’t have much photographic evidence yet, but this picture should suffice. I defended my dissertation, and I’m upgraded from Drs. P. to Dr. S.P. And, equally exciting, from PhD candidate/lecturer to assistant professor (it still means I teach and … Lees verder →

The final proposition – traditionally meant to be funny – is a witticism stolen from my father. It was also the final proposition to his doctoral dissertation, which had nothing to do with political leaders (it was about coins in … Lees verder →

The ninth proposition is a bit of a cliché, but a cliché that I am always happy to remind myself and others. When you study any text (in a broad sense, this also includes visual or otherwise non-verbal “texts”), it’s … Lees verder →

One important argument my thesis makes is that methods from cultural analysis (and literary studies) can help historians to interpret the past. One aspect that is central to cultural analysis is the idea that through observing one’s own responses to … Lees verder →

The seventh proposition to my thesis goes back to the third, and responds to Alison Landsberg’s theory about prosthetic memory. While Landsberg suggests that prosthetic memories created through watching, say, a movie about slavery, can work like “real” lived memories. … Lees verder →

The sixth is by some distance the longest proposition. It engages political theory and gives an explanation for why Roosevelt has also been virulently hated by opponents. In common-sense terms: he was a slippery rhetorician. This is related to the … Lees verder →

The fifth proposition represents, I would say the most high-level, over-arching conclusion to my thesis, the idea that FDR through his rhetoric, autofabricated a public image that is profoundly plastic. I don’t use plastic here to mean “fake”, but flexible … Lees verder →

Eleanor Roosevelt is often hailed as the first politically active First Lady and, in reference to her internationalism, as “First Lady of the World.” She clearly established herself in the public sphere and political arena as an active agent, contributing … Lees verder →

In 1980 literary critic and new historicist Stephen Greenblatt introduced the term “self-fashioning” in his book Renaissance Self-fashioning – From More to Shakespeare, to analyze how identities (selves) came to be more or less consciously produced (fashioned) in the sixteenth … Lees verder →