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John Carson

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Associate Professor of History, University of Michigan

John Carson is associate professor of history at the University of Michigan, and also a member of the interdisciplinary Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS). He did his B.A. in Philosophy at Harvard University and Ph.D. at Princeton University in History (of Science). Carson works primarily in the fields of U.S. cultural/intellectual history and history of the human sciences from the mid eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. His 2007 book, The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press), tells the story of how two new democratic republics dedicated to some version of equality turned to understandings of human nature to reinstitute inequality on a new, seemingly more “rational” footing.

Experience

  • 2004–present
    Associate professor, University of Michigan
  • 1998–2004
    Assistant professor, University of Michigan

Education

  • 1994 
    Princeton University, Ph.D.
  • 1976 
    Harvard University, B.A.

Publications

  • 2007
    The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750-1940, Princeton University Press

Professional Memberships

  • History of Science Society

Honours

Cheiron Book Prize, 2010; National Humanities Center fellow; Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin fellow; ACLS Ryskamp fellow