Event

In-Person: College Hall 209, 12:00 pm

Virtual: ZOOM LINK

Pre-circulated Paper Link 

Kathleen Belew teaches at the University of Chicago, specializing in twentieth-century United States, violence, militarization, women and gender, cultural history, race and racism. A historian of the present, Kathleen Belew's award-winning research, writing, and teaching center on the place of violence in American life and culture. She is interested in ideas of the end of the world and what they reveal about identity and belonging, conservatism, community, and the future.  Belew’s first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, uses previously classified FBI documents and vivid personal testimonies to explore how white power activists created a vast and influential social movement through a shared, post-Vietnam story about betrayal by the government. Belew excavates the deliberate disappearance of this movement that allowed it to resurface in the present moment.  She is currently working on a book provisionally entitled Home, at the End of the World: A History of the Present. Her virtual presentation at Penn is about this new project.