James Turner
Rev. John J. Cavanaugh, C.S.C. Professor of Humanities,
Field
American and Modern British Intellectual History
Profile
Turner teaches in both the History Department and the doctoral Program in History and Philosophy of Science. Educated at Harvard University, he received a B.A. in history summa cum laude in 1968 and a Ph.D. in history in 1975. After teaching at the College of Charleston and the University of Massachusetts in Boston, in 1985 he became professor of history at the University of Michigan. From 1992 to 1995 he was also a senior fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows. In 1995 he joined the faculty of Notre Dame. Since 1992, he has taught as well from time to time as directeur d’études invité at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
Turner has written six books: Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Johns Hopkins, 1985); The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Johns Hopkins, 1999); The Sacred and the Secular University (Princeton University Press, 2000; with Jon H. Roberts); Language, Religion, Knowledge (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), and The Future of Christian Learning: An Evangelical and Catholic Dialogue (Brazos Press, 2008; with Mark A. Noll). He also edited (with Heinz-Gerhard Justenhoven) Rethinking the State in the Age of Globalisation: Catholic Thought and Contemporary Political Theory (LIT-Verlag, 2003). From 1986 to 1997, Turner served on the editorial committee of Comparative Studies in Society and History and now serves on the editorial board of Modern Intellectual History and as associate editor of the Review of Politics. He is a member of the Scholars Council of the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.
Current Project
Turner is studying the origins of the modern humanities disciplines in the practices of philology, broadly construed. As presently conceived, the project is a history of humanistic learning from classical antiquity to the early twentieth century, with a strong stress on the period after 1750.
Teaching Interests
Turner teaches undergraduate courses in American intellectual history and in general American history and graduate colloquia in modern British and American intellectual history.
Recent Publications
“Did the Old South Have a Mind of Its Own?” Modern Intellectual History, (April 2005)
Language, Religion, Knowledge (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003).
Ed. (with Heinz-Gerhard Justenhoven) Rethinking the State in the Age of Globalisation: Catholic Thought and Contemporary Political Theory (2003)
“Charles Hodge in the Intellectual Weather of the Nineteenth Century,” in Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work, ed. John W. Stewart and James H. Moorhead (William B. Eerdmanns Publishing Co., 2002)
“Le concept de science dans l’Amérique du XIXe siècle,” Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales, (May-June 2002)
Contact
Office: 1113 Flanner
Phone: (574) 631-3434
Email: jturner2@nd.edu
Website: http://www.nd.edu/~history/faculty/profiles/turnerj.shtml
Office Hours: on leave 2007-2008