The Department of American and Canadian Studies welcome their first visiting speaker of 2015.

Professor Anders Stephanson, from Columbia University, will join UoN’s Ben Offiler to talk about ‘Presenting Philippines: world expositions, architecture, empire, concrete, roads, race and maybe the real’.

The US annexation of the Philippines in 1898, followed by a brutal war of subjugation (“pacification”) and eventually a new kind of social, political and economic “order,” coincided with two other developments: on the one hand, the advent of the Progressive Era and its explicit, connection with older (and contemporary) European models of “civilizational” history and, on the other, the would-be “end of the Frontier” and (as it turned out) the related end of domestic expansion in the form of pollulating, equal states. Through some fast travel through the many popular world expositions at the time, this slide lecture is an attempt to figure out how new kinds of understanding (among other things) the “real,” the “foreign,” the “civilizational” and “race” worked in the novel project of “the Philippines.”

Anders Stephanson is professor of history at the University of Columbia. He specializes in 20th-century American foreign relations as well as history and theory, and his books include Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (1989) and Manifest Destiny (1995). He is working on a book about diplomatic history and another book titled The United States as a Cold War.

Register to attend the talk online.