Colloquia
John Gaddis
Tolstoy’s Hare: How Historians Manipulate Time, Space and Scale
John Lewis Gaddis is Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University, where he teaches courses on the Cold War, grand strategy, biography, and historical methods. His most recent books include The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (2002), Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (2004), The Cold War: A New History (2005), a new edition of Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (2005), George F. Kennan: An American Life (2011), and On Grand Strategy (2018).
Professor Gaddis has received two awards for undergraduate teaching at Yale, as well as the National Humanities Medal and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for biography.
The lecture is part of a larger lecture series entitled “Managing Space” which explores the myriad ways in which architecture, urbanism, and the arts participate in or disrupt the administration, inhabitation, or usage of territory. Management, in the terminology of the course, seeks to encompass a broad array of strategic dispositions both spatial and representational, including but not limited to: technocratic governance, community arrangements or resistances, and individual affect. Drawing from a range of interdisciplinary texts and guest speakers, the course will cover housing policy and incremental planning; media interfaces and technological place-making; national identity and state power; ritual practices and cultural consolidation; and environmental precarity and systems theory. Readings will cover theories and secondary source material from the fields of architecture, real estate development, art history, anthropology, political science, and geography.