David Scobey--writing

WRITING

Here's a comprehensive list of my publications and a selection of unpublished papers and lectures. Below that is information about my book, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape; the cover image links to the Temple University Press splash page. The right column clusters my work on three themes: historical and cultural scholarship, civic and community engagement, and higher education. (This page doesn't include websites and exhibitions on which I was a principal author; see Past Projects.)

This page gives abbreviated titles and publication information. There is a full list with complete bibliographical information in my vita.

Wherever feasible, I give links to URLs or PDFs of the full texts (and for essays in edited volumes, to the publisher's splash page of the BOOK). Where a piece of writing discusses a community project or teaching experience, I include links to PROJECT or COURSE pages in this website.

COMPREHENSIVE LIST:

Books:

Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (2002)

Re-Imagining West Coconut Grove (consulting editor, 2006)

Essays, Articles, and Chapters:

“The Scientist, The Quester, and the Writer: Tristes Tropiques and Levi-Strauss,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (1978)

“Rousseau and the Call for Anthropology,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (1979)

“Boycotting the Politics Factory: Labor Radicalism and the New York City Mayoral Election of 1886,” Radical History Review (1984) PDF

“Revising the Errand: New England's Ways and the Puritan Sense of the Past,” William and Mary Quarterly (1984) PDF

“Anatomy of the Promenade: The Politics of Bourgeois Sociability In Nineteenth-Century New York,” Social History (1992) PDF

“What Shall We Do With Our Walls? The Philadelphia Exposition and the Meaning of Household Design,” in Rydell and Gwinn (eds.), Fair Representations: World's Fairs and the Modern World (1994)

“Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide” and “George W. Curtis,” entries in the Encyclopedia of the History of New York City (1998)

“The Specter of Citizenship,” Citizenship Studies (2001), 11-26 PDF

“Nymphs and Satyrs: Sex and the Bourgeois Public Sphere In Victorian New York,” Winterthur Portfolio (2002) PDF

“Putting the Academy In Its Place,” Places (2002) PDF PROJECT COURSE

“The Second Wave of Engagement: Learning From West Coconut Grove,” in Quraeshi (ed.), Re-Imagining West Coconut Grove (2006)

“Making Use of All Our Faculties: Public Scholarship and the Future of Campus Compact,” in Holland and Meeropol (eds.), A More Perfect Vision: The Future of Campus Engagement (online, 2006) URL PROJECT COURSE

“The Double Crisis and the Civic Mission of Education,” Maine Policy Review (2006) PDF

“Across: The Heterogeneity of Civic Education,” in Smith, Nowacek and Bernstein (eds.), Citizenship Across the Curriculum (2010) PDF BOOK

“A Copernican Moment: On the Revolutions In Higher Education,” in Harward (ed.), Transforming Undergraduate Education: Theory that Compels and Practices that Succeed (2011) PDF BOOK

“Journals and Journeys: The Why, What, Where, and Who of Public Scholarship,” The Journal of Public Scholarship In Higher Education (2011) PDF

“Civic Engagement and the Copernican Moment,” Foreseeable Futures (online, 2012) PDF

“Why Now? Because This is a Copernican Moment,” in Harward (ed.), Civic Provocations (2012) PDF BOOK

“Technology, Education, Democracy: Elements of an Emerging Paradigm,” Diversity & Democracy (online, 2014) PDF

“The Invitation,” Public (online, 2014) URL PROJECT COURSE

“E Pluribus Plenum: Why We (the People) Need the Humanities,” Michigan Quarterly Review (2015) PDF PROJECT

“Marginalized Majority: Nontraditional Students and the Equity Imperative,” Diversity & Democracy (online, 2016) PDF

“College Makes Me Feel Dangerous: On Well-Being and Nontraditional Students,” in Harward (ed.), Well-Being and Higher Education: A Strategy for Change and the Realization of Education’s Greater Purposes (2016) PDF BOOK

“The Frayed Compact: American Democracy, Higher Education, And The Movement For Community Engagement,” in Dolgon et al. (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Service Learning and Community Engagement (2017) BOOK

“Looking West From the Empire City: National Landscape and Visual Culture in Gilded-Age New York,” in Margaret R. Laster and Chelsea Bruner (eds.), New York: Art and Cultural Capital of the Gilded Age (Routledge, 2019)

“The Crossroads of Change: Why Adult Learners Are So Important to the Future of Higher Education (and Vice Versa),” Explorations In Higher Education 6 (Winter, 2020) PDF

"Sibling Rivals or Kissing Cousins? Community Engagement, Social Innovation, and Higher Education For the Public Good," in Eric Mlyn and Amanda Moore McBridge (eds.), Connecting Social Innovation and Civic Engagement: Toward Higher Education’s Democratic Promise (Stylus, 2020)

Reviews and Review Essays:

Review of Dumont, Homo aequalis, in Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (1978)

Review of “Eight Men Out” (film), in American Historical Review (1990) PDF

Review of Ward, Poverty, Ethnicity, and the City, in Journal of Interdisciplinary History (1990) PDF

“Commercial Culture, Urban Modernism, and the Intellectual Flaneur,” American Quarterly (1995) PDF

Review of Beveridge and Hoffman (eds.), The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: Writings On Public Parks, Parkways, and Park Systems (online, H-NET, 2000)

Journalism and Online Commentary:

“Meanings and Metrics,” Inside Higher Ed, March 19, 2009 URL

“dailynews.edu,” Inside Higher Ed, August 28, 2009 PDF

“What If My Great-Grandfather Endured ‘Extreme-Vetting’?” Detroit Free Press, October 8, 2016 URL

"The Other Student Debt Crisis," Inside Higher Ed, December 4, 2017, URL

“How Does Change Really Happen in Higher Ed?” AAC&U News, October, 2018 URL

“The Path Across America’s Divide Starts at Its Colleges,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 18, 2019 (annual “Trends” issue) URL

Selected Papers and Lectures:

“The Meanings of Reconstruction: Architecture, Race, and Citizenship After the Civil War” (National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C., 2001)

“Nation/Building: New York and the Meanings of Empire” (Columbia University, 2002)

“Civic Engagement and the Looming Crisis In Higher Education” (Wiggins Lecture, College of the Atlantic, 2004)

“Subscribing To America: Print Technologies, Series Forms, and 19th-Century Nation-Building” (keynote, University of British Columbia, 2005)

“The Cosmopolitanism of Community Engagement,” American Studies Association, Washington, D.C., 2005)

“The Public Work of the Liberal Arts” (Beloit College, 2006)

“Getting Out of the Bubble: or, The Subjective Necessity For Civic Engagement,” (Association of American Colleges and Universities, New Orleans, 2007)

“The Arts of Citizenship In a Diverse Democracy: The Public Work of the Arts and Humanities” (Wesleyan University, 2007)

“In Here/Out There: The Place Of Scholarship In A Democracy” (Concordia University, 2011) PROJECT

“A Tale of Two Moments” (plenary, Association of American Colleges and Universities, Washington, D.C., 2012)

“Civic Engagement and the Post-Traditional Student” (plenary, The Democracy Commitment/American Democracy Project, Denver, 2013) PROJECT

“Why Community-Based Learning Is Great For Education” (plenary, Texas A&M Corpus Christi, 2014)

“The Gifts of Liberal Education” (Robertson Memorial Lecture, University of Michigan, 2014)

“Social Innovation and Civic Engagement: Sibling Rivals or Kissing Cousins?” (keynote, Washington University, 2015)

"Traffic Jams, Speed Limits, Potholes, and Open Roads: The Intersections of Adult Learners" (conference, The Whole Student: Intersectionality and Well-Being, Chicago, 2017)

"Tenure And Promotion Policies That Value Engaged Scholarship: Lessons From The U.S. Experience" (Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation, Montreal, 2017)

“Culture Is a Medium of Citizenship” (Campus Compact national conference, Indianapolis, 2018)

“Current Crises, Creative Currents, Guiding Purposes: Notes For Navigating the Shoals and Storms of Higher Education” (University of Michigan lecture series on academic innovation, 2018)

“Navigating the Storm: Currents of Change and Creativity in Undergraduate Education,” keynote, Undergraduate Summit, Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health annual conference (Arlington, Virginia, March, 2019)

Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Temple University Press, 2002) explores city-building and urbanism in New York in the mid-19th century, a time of dramatic growth and transformation. It studies the institutions, actors, and values that shaped the city-building process. It describes the birth of a new urbanism, evident in works like Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, by which New Yorkers sought to master the social and environmental complexity of their city's growth. And it argues that their debates and conflicts over the shape of the "American metropolis" were also struggles about the values and ruling arrangements that would define the nation as a whole.

SELECTED HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL SCHOLARSHIP

BOOKS:

Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (2002)

ESSAYS, ARTICLES, AND CHAPTERS: