Rochelle Gurstein (NHC Fellow, 1998–99)

Fellowship Work Summary, 1998–99

Rochelle Gurstein wrote several chapters for her book and two essays: "Published Letters, Private Life, and the Limits of Knowledge: The Case of Thomas Carlyle" and "Rethinking the Mass-Society Critique," for the fall 1999 issue of Salmagundi. She served as a commentator for the session "Markets, Politics, and Identity," at the Inaugural Annual Meeting of the Historical Society in Boston, presented a paper,"Published Letters, Private Life, and the Limits of Knowledge: The Case of Thomas Carlyle," at the Symposium on Forbidden Knowledge at the Center for Free Inquiry of Hanover College, and another entitled "Taste and the Conversible World': The Invention of Aesthetic Sensibility in the Eighteenth Century," for the History Department at North Carolina State University. She also for a faculty seminar at the New School for Social Research. She served as a panelist on the topic of "Tradition vs. Freedom," at Georgetown University; and on the topic of "Sex, Lies, and the Presidency," for the Program in the Humanities and Human Values at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she also presented a paper on "How Obscenity Became the Litmus Test of the First Amendment," for the History Department. She was a participant in the Triangle Intellectual History Seminar.