Thomas Haskell academic papers

Thomas Haskell began teaching at Rice in 1970 and during his 39 years as a faculty member, he served as chair of the Department of History (1994-96), speaker of the Faculty Council (1995-96) and director of the Center for the Study of Cultures (1993-96), now known as the Humanities Research Center. He also served as chair of the Graduate Committee, chair of the Faculty Council Committee on Athletics and as a member of the Promotion and Tenure Committee along with other university committees. He was the Samuel G. McCann Professor Emeritus of History.

He is the author of numerous articles and several books on American intellectual and cultural history, including Objectivity is not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Johns Hopkins, 1998). His articles and review essays have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the American Historical Review, Reviews in American History, and History and Theory. Professor Haskell has taught courses on American thought and society, Victorian intellectuals, and the historical method and served on the editorial board of the Journal of American History, Modern Intellectual History, and Academe. He has also been appointed a fellow of the National Humanities Institute, a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study, a Guggenheim fellow, and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. In 2008 he was appointed the John P. Birkelund Fellow at the National Humanities Center to pursue research on “Sensibility and Moral Capital in Abolishing the Slave Trade.”

He died July 12, 2017 aged 78.