Robert Self
Associate Professor of History:
History
Phone: +1 401 863 1391
Robert_Self@brown.edu
My first book, American Babylon, focuses on race, political culture, and the American city in the second half of the twentieth century. My current project examines the intersection of gender, sexuality, race, and political culture in the U.S. between the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the presidential election of 2004. Broadly, I am interested in the relationship between politics, social movements, the state, and categories of identity and meaning, such as race or sexuality, across both time and space.
Biography
Robert O. Self teaches and writes in twentieth-century U.S. history. His principal research interests are in urban history, the history of race and American political culture, post-1945 U.S. society and culture, and gender in the mid-century city. His first book, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland, was published by Princeton University Press in 2003. It won four professional prizes, including the James a. Rawley prize from the Organization of American Historians (OAH). He is currently at work on a book about gender, sexuality, and political culture in the U.S. from 1964 to 2004.
Interests
My current project, provisionally titled A New Political Order: The Politics of Gender and Sexuality at the End of the American Century, takes my interest in political culture and liberalism in new directions. National in scope, the book is an exploration of how the sexual revolution, feminism(s), gay and lesbian liberation, and the new Right transformed American politics between 1964 and 2004. I treat the interaction and collision of these forces as an expansive process that included the multiple gender disruptions of the period: from the Vietnam War's problematic male soldier to the politics of abortion, welfare, black power, and gay liberation. In between the Civil Rights Act (1964), Watts rioting (1965), and the Moynihan Report (1965) and the Bush-era insurgencies of the 2000s, I trace the search for new male and female political subjectivities and the contests over manhood, feminism(s), and gay rights that remade liberalism in the intervening decades.
Awards
2008-2009 Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship
2007-2008 Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
2007-2008 Fellowship, Charles Warren Center, Harvard University (declined)
2006 Edwin and Shirley Seave Faculty Fellow, Pembroke Research Seminar, Brown University
2005 James A. Rawley Prize, Best Book (American Babylon) on U.S. Race Relations, Organization of American Historians
2005 Best Book (American Babylon) in Urban Affairs, Urban Affairs Association
2004 Ralph J. Bunche Award, Best Book (American Babylon) on Ethnic Pluralism, American Political Science Association
2004 Best Book (American Babylon) in North American Urban History, Urban History Association
2000 Best Article in Urban History, Urban History Association
Affiliations
Organization of American Historians (OAH)
American Historical Association (AHA)
Teaching
I teach courses on the post-1945 U.S., race and urban politics in the post-New Deal era, political movements and political culture in the 20th century, and on race, gender, and citizenship in U.S. history.
Funded Research
2005 Wriston Curricular Development Grant, Brown University ($3,000)
2005 Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award, Brown University ($10,775)
2004 Huntington Library, W. M. Keck Foundation and Andrew Mellon Foundation Fellow ($10,000)
2004 Center for 21st Century Studies Fellow, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (declined)
2002 Graduate School Research Committee, Research Grant, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee ($8,000)
2001 Rackham Summer Interdisciplinary Institute Fellowship, University of Michigan
2000 Office of the Vice President for Research Faculty Grant, University of Michigan ($2,000)
1999 American Philosophical Society, Research Grant ($2,000)
1999 Book Club of California, Manuscript Writing Fellowship ($2,000)
1997 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Dissertation Fellowship ($12,000)
1997 National Science Foundation, Dissertation Grant ($9,500)
1997 Rondeau Evans Dissertation Fellowship, History Department, University of Washington ($1,500)
1995 Harry Bridges Graduate Research Fellowship, University of Washington
Curriculum Vitae
