Princeton University

During the academic years 2010-11 and 2011-12 the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies will focus on problems of authority and legitimation. We welcome proposals that explore the popular claims of authority. How have regimes of power been legitimated, sustained, and identified with realms of justice, the sacred, or the natural? How have cultures of consent and allegiance been created and maintained? Under what historical conditions have those cultures fractured or dissolved?

The field of inquiry includes the study of political culture but it is by no means limited to modern politics; inquiries into other forms of religious, domestic, and social authority, broadly defined, are encouraged across a wide variety or periods and places, from prehistory to the present and from all parts of the world. Problems could include the rise of nationalist and civic cultures; the symbolic construction of the authority of kings, chieftains, texts, and law; the mobilization of religious and social movements; the legitimation of empires and regimes of labor; the naturalization of everyday forms of domestic power; as well as challenges to authority in the form of delegitimation, resistance, withdrawal, or revolution.