Talya Zemach-Bersin & Khalil Johnson - Empire and Education

Event time: 
Wednesday, March 27, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm
Location: 
17 Hillhouse Ave. Rm 113
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

Throughout the twentieth century, education in the United States has been central to republican virtue and democratic governance. Yet education has also done much of the heavy lifting for U.S. imperialism, as sites of conflict, ideological control, and discipline frequently moved from battlefields to classrooms. Bridging the often disparate disciplines of education studies and the history of U.S. empire, this panel turns a critical lens upon education at Yale University. Talya Zemach-Bersin uncovers how, in the wake of World War I, American activists, social scientists, and educators hungry for an era of U.S. global power turned away from the realm of formal political reforms and instead sought to achieve their aims through experiments in social engineering that were pioneered by Yale’s Institute of Human Relations. Focusing on the same time period, Khalil Anthony Johnson delves behind the history of Yale’s Department of Culture Contacts and Race Relations to illustrate how industrial philanthropy combined with institutional support to cultivate a global cohort of colonial educators trained in New Haven with the pedagogical tools to implement such social engineering through schools abroad.

Khalil Anthony Johnson, Jr., (PhD 2016) is an assistant professor of African American Studies at Wesleyan University. His essays have appeared in American Quarterly, Pacific Historical Review, and Journal of American Indian Education. He is currently at work on a book manuscript titled, Schooled: An Unsettling History of American Education.

Talya Zemach-Bersin (PhD 2015) is a lecturer in Education Studies at Yale University. Her current book project, Imperial Pedagogies: Education and the Making of U.S. Global Power, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.