KINGSTON, R.I. – March 28, 2025 – The University of Rhode Island will host Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jefferson Cowie on Thursday, April 3, to close out the URI Center for the Humanities’ yearlong series, “Sustaining Democracy.” 

Cowie’s talk, “Democracy and Populist Rage in Recent American History,” will be held at 4 p.m. in the Hope Room of the Higgins Welcome Center, 45 Upper College Road, Kingston. The event is free and open to the public; registration is recommended. The talk will also be livestreamed.

The center’s fifth annual lecture series, which dovetailed this fall with the 61^st annual Honors Colloquium on “Democracy in Peril,” brought to URI an array of experts—a poet and memoirist, artist, librarian, historians and public humanities practitioners—to address some of the greatest threats facing democracy in the nation today, while providing a perspective on how the arts and humanities can offer pathways to democratic engagement.

“It worked really well for the Center for the Humanities and the Honors Program to support each other in presenting a year of programming that engaged with the critical question of democracy from both a political perspective and an arts and humanities perspective,” said Evelyn Sterne, director of the center.

Cowie, the James G. Stahlman Chair in the Department of History at Vanderbilt University, studies the effect of class, inequality and labor on American politics and culture. His discussion will follow several historical trends—weakness of American liberal institutions, erosion of working-class power, nostalgic rage to reclaim a “golden age,” and an unstable global political order—and how they’ve converged to create the current political moment in the U.S. A question-and-answer session and book signing will follow his presentation.

“Professor Cowie brilliantly exemplifies the power of history to interpret and engage with the contemporary world,” said Sterne. “We’re thrilled that he has agreed to come to URI to help us understand how the past informs the present moment.”

Cowie was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2023 for “Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power,” which follows the evolution of white supremacy in an Alabama county in the 19^th and 20^th centuries and reveals the relationship between anti-government and racist ideologies. The New York Times called the book “important, deeply affecting—and deeply relevant.”

He is also the author of “Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class,” winner of the Parkman Prize and the Merle Curti Award, along with “The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics,” and “Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor,” winner of the Philip Taft Prize.

Cowie’s talk will also serve as the keynote talk for the humanities center’s annual spring festival, which will include the presentation of humanities excellence awards to Katelyn Boss and Wanda Hopkins, who will receive the undergraduate and graduate excellence awards, respectively.

Boss ’25, a senior majoring in history and art with minors in German and gender and women’s studies, is a member of multiple honor societies and received the Dr. Barbara Woods Memorial Award for Excellence in German Studies. She has made many contributions to the humanities on campus and off in her time at URI, including working on the College of Arts and Sciences’ 75^th anniversary celebration and in the URI University Archives. She has also interned at the South County Museum and volunteers as an archivist for the Rhode Island Wanderground Lesbian Archive and Library.

Hopkins, who will graduate this May with a master’s degree in English, has also demonstrated an exceptional commitment to the humanities. A member of the Narragansett Tribal Nation, she has served as chair of the Tomaquag Museum and is a member of URI’s Native American Advisory Council. She has also acted as guest editor of Motif Magazine’s 2024 Indigenous Heritage edition and organized the 2024 Poetry of the Wild workshop for the Rhode Island Environmental Education Association.