Research Seminars

For 30 years Hagley’s research seminars have featured innovative works-in-progress essays to generate wide-ranging discussions among an interested audience.

 Beginning in spring 2022 the seminars will move to an online format, meeting monthly on Zoom during the academic year from noon to 1:30 Eastern time. Seminars are open to the public and based on a paper that is circulated in advance. Copies may be obtained by registering for the seminar you wish to attend. Please email Carol Lockman at clockman@Hagley.org if you have any questions about the seminars.

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Upcoming Research Seminars

2023 - 2024 Series -- View Series PDF

  • October 25, 2023: Ai Hisano, "Everyday Aesthetics: Industrial Design and the Senses in the United States from the 1920s to the 1950s"

    “Our basic appreciation of design is ultimately dependent upon what we sense through vision, taste, hearing, smelling and feeling,” argued the industrial designer J. Gordon Lippincott in his 1947 book. By focusing on the expansion of industrial design in the United States from the 1920s to the 1950s, this paper explores how industrial designers helped construct people’s sensory experience in buying and using products.

  • December 13, 2023: Anna Andrzejewski, "Making Paradise: Living in South Florida’s Vacation and Retirement Communities"

    In the 25 years after World War II, the coastline of South Florida was transformed into a sprawling cultural landscape of leisure, made up of suburban communities designed for vacationers and retirees. While builders and real estate developers were integral in drawing throngs of leisure seekers to South Florida from the Midwest and Northeastern U.S., residents also played a critical role in shaping this “paradise.”

2022 - 2023 Series -- View Series PDF

  • January 1, 2024: Brent Cebul, “Creating the Intern: Philanthropy, Universities, and the New Deal”

    This seminar is postponed until the 2023-2024 series.

    Proximity to power, access to professional networks, and acquisition of insider knowledge has come to define the “intangible things” unpaid internships claim to offer students—whether in the public service or in proliferating private internship programs. This paper locates the origins of the modern, private white-collar internship in the growth of the New Deal administrative state and the simultaneous emergence of entrepreneurial, growth-oriented private universities and elite philanthropies concerned with fostering “realistic” and “impartial” administrators and managers.

Past Research Seminars

2023 - 2024 Series -- View Series PDF

2022 - 2023 Series -- View Series PDF

2021 - 2022 Series -- View Series PDF

2019 - 2020 Series -- View Series PDF

2018 - 2019 Series -- View Series PDF

2017 - 2018 Series -- View Series PDF

2016 - 2017 Series -- View Series PDF

2015 - 2016 Series -- View Series PDF

2014 - 2015 Series -- View Series PDF

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