Join us for a conversation with Lara Putnam, professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, about her research on political campaigns and social networks in Pennsylvania. The conversation will be guided by David Singerman, assistant professor of history and American studies at UVA, building on their 2022 conversation for the online journal Public Books (“Lara Putnam wants you to knock on your neighbor’s door”).
Putnam’s research on contemporary democracy in Pennsylvania has been showcased in numerous publications, including “The progressive base is more pragmatic than you might think” in Vox; “Rust Belt in Transition: What has happened in Pennsylvania’s, and the entire Rust Belt’s, “Middle Suburb” counties, and can it be reversed?” in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas; and “The Floyd protests are the broadest in U.S. history — and are spreading to white, small-town America,” (with Erica Chenoweth and Jeremy Pressman) at the Monkey Cage Blog of The Washington Post. She is a Latin American historian and the author of Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (2013) and of an influential article on the Digital Humanities, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast” in the American Historical Review.
