While in residence as the History Center Distinguished Visiting Professor, David Roediger will be offering a grad seminar titled "Racial Formation in US History," delivering a public lecture, and will help organize a conference of USC faculty and outside scholars on the concept of  "Whiteness in Atlantic History."   During the Spring 2012 term Dr. Roediger will live on campus in the "Green Quad". Professor Roediger's visit reinforces the History Center's thematic theme of "Constructing Categories" for the academic year of 2011-12. This year-long series will explore how societies and individuals across a large span of time and space have constructed categories and what meanings they have attached to them. In particular, the series will explore the creation of categories themselves and how historians and scholars have employed and constructed categories to structure their investigations of the past. Professor Roediger has been at the forefront of the effort to examine the ways in which race has been constructed in American history.  In particular, his examination of the history of “whiteness,” a field he pioneered, has shown that racial categories do not simply include non-white peoples, but that whiteness itself is a surprisingly new racial category and that many people today who we think of as unambiguously “white,” might well have been seen differently in the past.
 
Professor Roediger is among the most widely recognized scholars in the historical profession over the last twenty years for causing scholars to think critically about the categories of analysis they employ. In 1991 David R. Roediger published The Wages of Whiteness:  Race and the Making of the American Working Class, which among other awards received the Merle Curti Prize for US Social History from the Organization of American Historians.  Among the book's many achievements was to historicize critical race theory, inject cultural and contingent factors into labor history, and show how the American working class received a psychological wage by constructing a "white" identity in opposition to their fellow black workers.  Since the book's publication over 20 years ago, the concept of "whiteness" as pioneered by Roediger has become widely employed by historians as an analytical category. In recognition of the influence of Roediger's scholarship in developing the field of "whiteness" studies on the 20th anniversary of the publication of The Wages of Whiteness, and to mark his semester long role as our distinguished visiting professor in the History Department, the History Center plans to run a mini-workshop to coincide with his visit in March 2012.  USC faculty and outside scholars will take part in the workshop by developing papers that take a critical historical and historiographical perspective on the concept of "whiteness." The workshop will examine and debate the applicability and influence of the category of "whiteness" by extending its study far outside Roediger's temporal and geographic laboratory of the 19th century United States.  The geographic terrain of the workshop will include the Early Modern Atlantic, Latin America, West and Central Africa, and Post WWII Europe.