Isaac Ariail Reed, Author at Public Seminar

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The All Too Human Behavioral Geneticists

A review of Aaron Panofsky’s Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics

March 14, 2019 • by Isaac Ariail Reed

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a social theorist of our generation, possessed of rich data and much sociological insight, must be in want of Bourdieu. In what follows, I will try to explicate why I think the ironic meaning of this statement is as true as its literal ...

The All Too Human Behavioral Geneticists

Politics

Sociology of Power and Authority

Fall 2017 at University of Virginia

January 23, 2018 • by Isaac Ariail Reed

The Sociology of Power and Authority was offered in Fall 2017 at the University of Virginia. It was an upper-division undergraduate seminar with 20 students, meeting for an hour and fifteen minutes twice a week. On the first day of the course, several students revealed, unprompted, that they had been ...

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Jefferson’s Two Bodies

Memory, protest, and democracy at the University of Virginia and beyond

October 19, 2017 • by Isaac Ariail Reed

The students who shrouded Jefferson pulled the memory of the author of the Declaration of Independence — that document so useful to Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others — into a larger series of conflicts over memorialization. These conflicts have tended focus on monuments to the ...

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Trump as Ubu Roi

On the charismatic appeal of vulgarity

June 6, 2017 • by Isaac Ariail Reed

Many are the analogies for the current President of the United States. Such analogies always contain within them theoretical debates about the nature of Trump’s appeal, the prospects for his rule, and how the coterie around him will conduct themselves in relation to Trump, in relation to each other, and ...

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The Whiskey Rebellion, Political Crisis, and the Sociology of Elite Interpretation

From the early modern to the contemporary USA, part 2

May 10, 2017 • by Isaac Ariail Reed

Among the grievances that fueled the rebels we can include an early modern version of a bailout. Government issued bonds had been used to pay the soldiers in the Continental Army during the revolutionary war. During the economic depression of the 1780s, speculators had bought these up for pennies on ...

The Whiskey Rebellion, Political Crisis, and the Sociology of Elite Interpretation

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Anthony Wayne, Distributed Sovereignty, and the Bodies of the Republic

From the early modern to the contemporary USA, part 1

April 10, 2017 • by Isaac Ariail Reed

Is Wayne -- from his uncouthness to his ruthlessness to his success -- useful to think with today? There are certainly ways he haunts our present. Historians, for example, have often seen him as a forbearer of Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policies. And as such he connects, via a recent, ...