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Faculty Fellow

James Sparrow

Associate Professor of History, the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College University of Chicago

Biography

James Sparrow is a historian of modern US politics broadly construed, with special interests in the mutual constitution of social categories, democratic publics, and state formation. His first book, Warfare State (Oxford University Press, 2011), is a history of the social politics of the national state as its foundations shifted from welfare to warfare during World War II. He is currently completing a sequel to Warfare State tentatively titled Sovereign Discipline: The American Extraterritorial State in the Atomic Age. This book examines the mass politics of extraterritorial sovereignty, and the crisis of legitimacy it engendered, from V-E Day to the Cuban Missile Crisis. His third book project, an intellectual history titled New Leviathan: Rethinking Sovereignty and Political Agency after Total War, is also nearing completion. Much of this recent work is informed by a long-term collaborative research project on the problem of the democratic state supported by two Neubauer Collegium projects (The State as History and Theory and The Problem of the Democratic State in US History). The collaboration resulted in the edited collection Boundaries of the State in US History as well as two special issues of the Tocqueville Review.


To learn more about James Sparrow's research and publications, please visit his profile page at the Department of History.

Featured Project

Faces of famous leaders on banknotes from around the world

Democracy and Capitalism: An Interdisciplinary Project in History, Law, and Politics

2022 – 2023

Projects

The Infrastructures of American Hegemony

In an editorial cartoon published circa 1900, Uncle Sam steps over the Philippines to carry goods to China.

The Infrastructures of American Hegemony

This project aims to inspire new collaborations between scholars of international relations and American politics by examining the changes that enabled the United States to enter into global politics—first as an imperial force and later as a decisive player in global conflict.

This research project will explore the material, ideational, and domestic political changes that enabled the United States to enter into global politics — first as an imperial force, and later as an architect of a liberal international order. Ruth Bloch Rubin’s research will focus on the...

Textual Optics

Textual Optics

An interdisciplinary group of scholars collaborated in a lab-like environment to formulate a unique, data-driven approach to the reading and interpretation of textual archives, from single words up to millions of volumes.

With the rise of the digital humanities has come the promise of new methods of exploring literary texts on an unprecedented scale. How does our approach to literature and literary history change when the canon expands to include millions of texts—all of them immediately analyzable by...

The Problem of the Democratic State in US History

The Problem of the Democratic State in US History

This project continued the work of the State as History and Theory project, convening sociologists, political scientists, and historians for sustained discussions about the nature of U.S. democracy.

Along with its predecessor, the State as History and Theory project (2013–2014), this project fostered a collaborative network of scholars advancing a new approach to the study of U.S. democratic power....

Project Team:

The State as History and Theory

The State as History and Theory

This project brought together a transatlantic group of scholars to advance a new approach to the study of U.S. democratic power that accounts for the mutual construction of state and society.

The State as History and Theory project fostered a collaborative network of scholars advancing a new approach to the study of U.S. democratic power. Bringing together a growing international cohort of historians, sociologists, and political scientists, the project built on Max Weber’s theories...