T. J. Jackson Lears
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Intellectual historian T. J. Jackson Lears argues there has been a recent reemergence of "nineteenth-century positivist faith that a reified 'science' has discovered (or is about to discover) all the important truths about human life. Precise measurement and rigorous calculation, in this view, are the basis for finally settling enduring metaphysical and moral controversies." Lears specifically identifies Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker's work as falling in this category. Philosophers John N. Gray and Thomas Nagel have leveled similar criticisms against popular works by moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, atheist author Sam Harris, and writer Malcolm Gladwell." --Sholem Stein |
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T. J. Jackson Lears (born 1947) is an American cultural and intellectual historian with interests in comparative religious history, literature and the visual arts, folklore and folk beliefs. Lears was educated at the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, and Yale University, where he received a Ph.D. in American Studies. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Winterthur Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University. In October 2003 he received the Public Humanities Award from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. He has been a regular contributor to The New Republic, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, among other publications. He has taught at Yale University, the University of Missouri, and New York University.
Lears is the Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University and Editor in Chief of the Raritan Quarterly Review. His books include No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (1981), Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (1994), Something for Nothing: Luck in America (2003), and Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (2009). He has written essays and reviews in The New York Times, The Nation, The London Review of Books, The New Republic and other magazines.
