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Speaker: Sean Wilentz

Sean Wilentz is the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History, focusing on American social and political history. He received his Ph.D. in history from Yale University (1980) after earning bachelor’s degrees from Columbia University (1972) and Balliol College, Oxford University (1974). His most recent books are The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008, a reconsideration of U.S. politics since the Watergate affair, and Bob Dylan in America, a consideration of Dylan's place in American cultural history. A contributing editor to The New Republic and a member of the editorial boards of Dissent and Democracy, he lectures frequently and has written some three hundred articles, reviews, and op-ed pieces for publications such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The American Scholar, The Nation, Le Monde, and Salon.

Respondent: Sarah Rivett

Sarah Rivett is an associate professor of English. She specializes in early American and 18th-century transatlantic literature and culture. Her first book, The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (2011) was awarded the Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History. She is currently completing Unscripted America: the Origins of a Literary Nation, under contract with Oxford University Press. She is also writing The New Cambridge Introduction to the Literature of Early America. Additionally, she has co-edited a volume of essays on Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas (2014).