Fergus Selsdon Games
I am a History PhD candidate at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge. My project - provisionally titled: Progress, Democracy and John Dewey's Afterlives, 1944-2000 - aims to trace the intellectual afterlives of political philosopher and social critic John Dewey (1859-1952). Narrating a series of criss-crossing revivals in his intellectual and cultural reputation, the dissertation asks: how did America think after Dewey? My research is supervised by Prof. Gary Gerstle and sponsored by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership and the Isaac Newton Trust.
Prior to Cambridge, I received a BA in Politics and Modern History (University of Manchester) and an MA in United States Studies: History and Politics (UCL). My MA dissertation work centred on ‘textbook activism’ and 1960s-80s conservative education politics in the American South.
My broader research interests lie within the fields of twentieth-century US Intellectual History, American Political Thought, Cultural History and Social Theory.
T15: The United States Since World War I
‘Dewey and the Practice of American Social Thought, 1952-1959’ - Society for US Intellectual History Annual Conference 2023 (Denver, CO)
‘Secular Saints and Sinners: American Liberalism and Early-Cold War Morality’ – Arts and Humanities Research Council ‘Entanglements’ International Conference 2023 (Lady Margaret Hall College, Oxford University)
‘Progress, Democracy and John Dewey’s Afterlives’ - Work in Progress Talk 2023 (Kluge Center, Library of Congress)
‘John Dewey, Race and Educational Thought in the 1970s’ – Society for US Intellectual History Annual Conference 2022 (Boston, MA)