Research Focus Group in Modernist Studies Friday, May 23, 2003 / 3:30 pm / Free South Hall 2635 Abstract: American modernity is rooted in cheap and abundant energy. This is arguably the single most important fact about our historical moment. The energy regimes of coal and steam beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and petroleum and electricity in the twentieth so fundamentally restructured the realm of human possibility that they mark what one scholar has termed "the great transition" into the modern world. However uncontroversial it might be to lay claim to the centrality of energy in the modern era, studies of "the modern," "modernism," and "modernity" have not typically accorded energy the type of importance it would seem to warrant. This talk considers the meaning of energy to the modern moment and offers some observations on the cultural poetics of energy in the early twentieth-century United States. Bio: Robert M. Johnson is currently in residence in the History Department at UCSB on a post-doctoral fellowship. He earned his Ph.D. in History from UCI in Fall 2002. His dissertation is entitled, "American Modernity and the Cultural Politics of Progressivism: The Survey and Survey Graphic, 1919-1929." He has published in American Quarterly. Top of Page <<Back