Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society Organization Logo Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

Research Project

The Infrastructures of American Hegemony

2020 – 2022
In an editorial cartoon published circa 1900, Uncle Sam steps over the Philippines to carry goods to China.

Emil Flohri, And, After All, the Philippines Are Only the Stepping-Stone to China, editorial cartoon, Judge Magazine, circa 1900.

Key Question

Project Summary

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.

Research Team

Daniel Abebe

Daniel Abebe

Vice Provost, Harold J. and Marion F. Green Professor of Law, Walter Mander Teaching Scholar, Associate Member of the Department of Political Science, Faculty Affiliate of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture

University of Chicago

Daniel Abebe’s scholarship focuses on the relationship between the constitutional law of US foreign affairs and public international law. His research has been published in The University of Chicago Law Review, The Supreme Court Review, and The Virginia Journal of International...

Kathleen Belew

Kathleen Belew

Associate Professor of History

Northwestern University

Kathleen Belew's research, writing, and teaching center on the place of violence in American life and culture. She is interested ideas of the end of the world and what they reveal about identity and belonging, conservatism, community, and the future. Belew’s first book,

Ruth Bloch Rubin

Ruth Bloch Rubin

Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science

University of Chicago

Ruth Bloch Rubin studies American politics, with a substantive focus on legislative institutions, political parties, and American political development. Combining archival and interview data, her current work explores how divisions within political parties drive congressional development and...

Austin Carson

Austin Carson

Assistant Professor, Political Science

University of Chicago

Austin Carson is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His main research focus is the politics of secrecy in International Relations. His first book, Secret Wars: Covert Conflict in International Politics (Princeton UP 2018),...

Julian Go

Julian Go

Professor of Sociology; Faculty Affiliate in the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture; The Committee on International Relations; Senior Fellow, Society of Fellows, the College

University of Chicago

Julian Go’s research explores the social logics, forms and impact of empires and colonialism; postcolonial/decolonial thought and related questions of social theory, epistemology, and knowledge; and global historical sociology. Much of Go’s work has focused on the US empire, resulting in...

Daniel Immerwahr

Daniel Immerwahr

Professor of History

Northwestern University

Daniel Immerwahr (Ph.D., Berkeley, 2011) is a professor of history, specializing in twentieth-century U.S. history within a global context. His first book, Thinking Small (Harvard, 2015), offers a critical account of grassroots development campaigns launched by the United States at home...

Jennifer Pitts

Jennifer Pitts

Professor and Associate Chair, Political Science

University of Chicago

Jennifer Pitts is the author of Boundaries of the International (Harvard 2018), which explores European debates over legal relations with extra-European societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the co-editor, with Adom Getachew, of W.E.B. Du Bois: International...

James Sparrow

James Sparrow

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

University of Chicago

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...

Project Narrative

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