Dear All,
The HistGeogUni Lecture 2019, to which you are cordially invited, will be given by
Dr Tamson Pietsch (University of Technology Sydney)
on Thursday, 23 May 2019, from 16:00 to 17:30
at Loughborough University, Brockington Extension Building, Room U.0.05:
"How to Know the World? The Floating University in the Age of American Empire”
Abstract
In September 1926, 500 American university students left New York on the
Floating University. The brainchild of New York University’s Professor of
Psychology, James E. Lough, it was billed as an eight-month ‘educational cruise
around the world’ that would stop at forty-seven ports and pay visits to foreign
dignitaries including the King of Siam, the Sultan of Jodhpur, Mussolini and the
Pope. The venture promised a ‘world education’ to students: a ‘college year of
educational travel and systematic study to develop an interest in foreign affairs,
to train students to think in world terms, and to strengthen international
understanding and good will.’ Professor Lough’s ‘pedagogical experiment’ had
strong intellectual foundations in the new psychology and new educational
movements pioneered in the United States by William James and John Dewey,
and it answered a rapidly growing demand for international student travel.
But what world were the Floating University students learning to know? Despite
their differing pedagogical approaches, Professor Lough and his detractors in the
United States were entangled in the politics of America’s emerging global power,
and what the students learnt on the voyage was deeply inflected by its expanding
imperial geographies. The Floating University sailed along the contours of
American commercial, cultural, and military power in the Pacific, the Philippines,
and Belgium. The students rode on the coat tails of older European empires, the
governors of which were wary of the young Americans, even as they welcomed
them in Algeria, Hong Kong, and Java. But, every now and then, other ways of
knowing forced themselves onto the ship. What did rising Japanese industrial
power mean? Why did the King of Siam host the students in his palace? Was US
rule in the Philippines justified? Why did the Floating University keep losing the
sporting competitions with local university teams? This lecture takes up these
questions as part of a wider exploration of American universities' claims to
authority over knowledge of the world in the interwar period.
For more information, please see http://www.histgeog-uni.net/projects/annual-lecture/.
With best wishes
Heike Jons
Geography & Environment
School of Social Sciences
Loughborough University
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