PROGRAM

This lecture is presented by the New York Area Political Theory Faculty Seminar and supported by the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute and the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Hunter College.

You are invited to attend a special lecture featuring Rogers Smith (University of Pennsylvania).

Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in the Trump Years

President Trump’s Inaugural Address offered a dramatic “America First” vision of the nation’s identity and purpose. Rogers Smith will argue that this vision has counterparts in resurgent nationalist movements in many parts of the world today, and has strengths in comparison with some rival accounts of U.S. identity that have shaped modern America. Even so, he will argue it still falls short of the best sense of what America is and should be: the vision of Americans as engaged in a continuing quest for human progress that is rooted in anti-slavery thought and the Declaration of Independence.

Rogers M. Smith is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Associate Dean for the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, and Chair of the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism. He is the author or co-author of many articles and seven books, including Political Peoplehood (2015), Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama’s America with Desmond S. King (2011), Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (2003), and Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (1997). Civic Ideals received six best book prizes from four professional associations and was a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History. Smith was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2011, and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2016.