"Making Michigan in the Industrial Age: U-M’s Detroit Connection" will explore the relationship between the university and the city during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Over the course of these decades, Detroit became an industrial metropolis, and U-M emerged as one of the nation's leading research universities. This panel will address the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of these overlapping histories.

Christopher Newfield (University of California, Santa Barbara), author of Ivy and Industry, will discuss the university's contribution to managerial culture, the democratizing potential of public universities, and the ways in which Emersonian individualism limited this potential. Stefan Link (Dartmouth College) and Noam Maggor (Cornell University), co-authors of a forthcoming book on industrialization in the U.S., will examine the unique place of the American Midwest, particularly Detroit, within national and global patterns of economic development. Anthony Ross (University of Michigan) will survey the relationship between the university and Detroit's industrial elite, situating the Michigan experience within broader histories of education and industrialization.

Stefan Link is an Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth College. He specializes in economic history, business history, and the intellectual history of capitalism. He is currently working on a book manuscript on the global spread of Fordism in the interwar years. Other research projects concern the political history of the early American automobile industry, the transformation of the world economic order in the 1930s, and comparative perspectives on American economic development since the Civil War. Link earned his Ph.D. from Harvard and has been a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

Noam Maggor is a historian of the United States in the long nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the emergence of industrial capitalism. His book, Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America's First Gilded Age tracks the movement of finance capital from Boston toward far-flung investment frontiers in the trans-Mississippi West in the aftermath of the Civil War. Maggor is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of History at Cornell University, where he teaches courses on the history of capitalism and the history of globalization.

Christopher Newfield is a professor of literature and American studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Much of his research is in Critical University Studies, which links his enduring concern with humanities teaching to the study of how higher education continues to be re-shaped by industry and other economic forces. His new book, called The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them, was published in November 2016 and assesses the post-2008 struggles of public universities to rebuild their social missions.

Anthony Ross received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan in 2015. He is currently a Research Associate at the University of Michigan.

This LSA Bicentennial Theme Semester event is presented with support from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and the University of Michigan Bicentennial Office. Additional support provided by the Department of History and the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.