Visiting Scholars

Steven Conn taught in the history department at Ohio State University before becoming the W. E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Professor Conn is the author of seven books and the editor of three others. In his work, he interrogates the function of museums and the memory work they perform, and his scholarship on the history of American museums has become foundational to Museum Studies in the United States. More recently, Steven Conn has turned his attention to the history of the urban-rural dynamic and the ways it has shaped American places, attitudes, and politics. His latest book, The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is – and Isn’t (University of Chicago Press, 2023), has positioned him as one of the leading figures in the field of rural history. Like his earlier work, this book has garnered attention both inside and outside the academy.

Over the course of his career, Conn has also been a committed public historian, bridging the gap between academic scholarship in history and wider, non-academic audiences. Almost twenty years ago, he founded the online history journal Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective (origins.osu.edu). He continues to co-edit the magazine, which features first-rate historical scholarship made accessible to the public and now reaches over three million readers each year. A few years ago, the Origins team was approached by Getty Images to collaborate, and the result was another website called “Picturing Black History” (picturingblackhistory.org), which invites historians to mine Getty’s vast trove of photographs and write short essays exploring the Black American experience in all its complexity. Last year, a book version of the project was published in partnership with Abrams Books. It was nominated for an NAACP award.

Between 15 May and 15 June, Steven Conn will be a visiting scholar at the American Studies Center (CSAM) through the Visiting@UVT grant program. During his stay at the West University of Timișoara, he will be working on a research article examining the tensions between the myth of the small town and the realities of these places in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The article focuses on towns in the rural South and Midwest of the United States, where changes to the agricultural economy caused many communities to shrink and decline. While we often think of small rural towns as existing in a kind of isolation, lampooned by writers as dull and backward, Steven Conn has discovered that many of these places fashioned their own small-scale urban cultural life. Small towns across the Midwest boasted Carnegie libraries, local historical societies and museums, fraternal organizations, and a surprising degree of ethnic and racial diversity. “Opera houses” were once ubiquitous in these communities, hosting a wide range of cultural and musical events. With population loss, much of this “urbanism” has disappeared as well, along with a vanished cultural world that Professor Conn seeks to recover.

Leah Perry is Professor of Literature, Communication, and Cultural Studies at SUNY-Empire State University and a former Fulbright Scholar (Hungary 2017-18 and 2019; Romania 2022-2023). She is the author of The Cultural Politics of U.S. Immigration: Gender, Race, and Media (New York University Press, 2016), and Indigenous Dispossession, Anti-Immigration, and The Public Pedagogy of U.S. Empire (Ohio State University Press, 2024). Her work can also be seen in the book collections Cultural Studies and the ‘Juridical Turn’: Culture, Law, and Legitimacy in the Era of Neoliberal Capitalism (Routledge, 2016), American Shame: Stigma and the Body Politic (University of Indiana Press, 2016), and Migration, Identity, and Belonging: Defining Borders and Boundaries of the Homeland (Routledge, 2020) and in journals such as Cultural Studies and Lateral. Dr. Perry received her doctorate from George Mason University in Cultural Studies, a Master of Arts from New York University in Humanities and Social Thought, a Master of Arts and Religion from Yale Divinity School, and a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Manhattanville College. Her research and teaching interests encompass gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, migration, Indigenous studies, and media and popular culture. She previously served the American Studies Association as co-chair of the Committee on Gender and Sexuality Studies from 2014-2016.

Between 1-31 May 2026, professor Perry will be a visiting scholar at the American Studies Center (CSAM), through the Visiting@UVT grant program. Together with CSAM research secretary Loredana Bercuci, she will be working on a project that analyzes how the US government has approached health issues related to food over three presidencies: Obama, Biden, Trump. The corpus analyzed will be compiled from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ press releases within the timespan 2009-2026. This research draws on Leah Perry’s work on foodways and empire. Historically and into the neoliberal context, foodways have been essential to what Aileen Moreton Robinson (Goenpul) calls “white possession,” the white heteropatriarchal property interests that structure settler colonial racial capitalism.  In the US, distinct but always entangled foodways “public pedagogies”—which Perry defines as policy and mainstream media discourses—about Indigenous peoples, Black people, and racialized immigrants literally feed empire even as it positions them differently and often antagonistically, with imperialism generating chattel slavery (and its anti-Black afterlives) and international migration, while expecting people of color to pursue access to white possession that is inherently dependent upon Indigenous dispossession. During her stay at the West University of Timisoara, Leah Perry will be investigating how recent administrations perpetuate foodways violence.