Neoconservatism is a political movement that began in the United States and the United Kingdom during the 1960s during the Vietnam War among foreign policy hawks who became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist Democratic Party and with the growing New Left and counterculture of the 1960s. Neoconservatives typically advocate the unilateral promotion of democracy and interventionism in international affairs, grounded in a militaristic and realist philosophy of "peace through strength." They are known for espousing opposition to communism and political radicalism.
Carolyn Heilbrun was an American academic at Columbia University, the first woman to receive tenure in the English department, and a prolific feminist author of academic studies. In addition, beginning in the 1960s, she published numerous popular mystery novels with a woman protagonist, under the pen name of Amanda Cross. These have been translated into numerous languages and in total sold nearly one million copies worldwide.
The Modern Language Association of America, often referred to as the Modern Language Association (MLA), is widely considered the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature. The MLA aims to "strengthen the study and teaching of language and literature". The organization includes over 25,000 members in 100 countries, primarily academic scholars, professors, and graduate students who study or teach language and literature, including English, other modern languages, and comparative literature. Although founded in the United States, with offices in New York City, the MLA's membership, concerns, reputation, and influence are international in scope.
Christina Marie Hoff Sommers is an American author and philosopher. Specializing in ethics, she is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Sommers is known for her critique of contemporary feminism. Her work includes the books Who Stole Feminism? (1994) and The War Against Boys (2000). She also hosts a video blog called The Factual Feminist.
Joseph Epstein is an American writer who was the editor of the magazine The American Scholar from 1975 to 1997. His essays and stories have appeared in books and other publications.
Elizabeth Ann Fox-Genovese was an American historian best known for her works on women and society in the Antebellum South. A Marxist early on in her career, she later converted to Roman Catholicism and became a primary voice of the conservative women's movement. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2003.
Neoconservatism and paleoconservatism are two major branches of the American conservative political movement. Representatives of each faction often argue that the other does not represent true conservatism. Disputed issues include immigration, trade, the United States Constitution, taxation, budget, business, the Federal Reserve, drug policy, foreign aid and the foreign policy of the United States.
John Agresto is an American author, lecturer, and university administrator.
Madonna studies refers to the study of the work and life of American singer-songwriter Madonna using an interdisciplinary approach incorporating cultural studies and media studies. In a general sense, it could refer to any academic studies devoted to her. After Madonna's debut in 1983, the discipline did not take long to start up and the field appeared in the mid-1980s, achieving its peak in the next decade. By this time, educator David Buckingham deemed her presence in academic circles as "a meteoric rise to academic canonisation". The rhetoric academic view of that time, majority in the sense of postmodernism, generally considered her as "the most significant artist of the late twentieth century" according to The Nation, thus she was understood variously and as a vehicle to open up issues. Into the 21st century, Madonna continued to receive academic attention. At the height of its developments, authors of these academic writings were sometimes called "Madonna scholars" or "Madonnologists", and both E. Ann Kaplan and John Fiske were classified as precursors.
Stephen H. Balch is an American conservative scholar and higher education reformer. He was the founding president of the National Association of Scholars from 1987 to 2009.
Ruth Wisse is a Canadian academic and is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University emerita. She is a scholar of Yiddish literature and of Jewish history and culture.
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is an American 501(c)(3) non-profit politically conservative education advocacy organization. It advocates against multiculturalism, diversity policies, and against courses focused on race and gender issues.
Greta Gaard is an ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker. Gaard's academic work in the realms of ecocriticism and ecocomposition is widely cited by scholars in the disciplines of composition and literary criticism. Her theoretical work extending ecofeminist thought into queer theory, queer ecology, vegetarianism, and animal liberation has been influential within women's studies. A cofounder of the Minnesota Green Party, Gaard documented the transition of the U.S. Green movement into the Green Party of the United States in her book, Ecological Politics. She is currently a professor of English at University of Wisconsin-River Falls and a community faculty member in Women's Studies at Metropolitan State University, Twin Cities.
The Children's Literature Association (ChLA) is a non-profit association, based in the United States, of scholars, critics, professors, students, librarians, teachers, and institutions dedicated to studying children's literature. Begun in the 1970s to generate interest in children's literature as an academic discipline and to provide a place for those studying children's literature to share ideas, the association sponsors an annual conference, two scholarly journals, and a series of awards. The association has also published a series of essays, Touchstones, attempting to establish a canon of children's literature.
Katherine Kersten is a conservative columnist who wrote for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women is a 1994 book about American feminism by Christina Hoff Sommers, a writer who was at that time a philosophy professor at Clark University. Sommers argues that there is a split between equity feminism and what she terms "gender feminism". Sommers contends that equity feminists seek equal legal rights for women and men, while gender feminists seek to counteract historical inequalities based on gender. Sommers argues that gender feminists have made false claims about issues such as anorexia and domestic battery and exerted a harmful influence on American college campuses. Who Stole Feminism? received wide attention for its attack on American feminism, and it was given highly polarized reviews divided between conservative and liberal commentators. Some reviewers praised the book, while others found it flawed.
Barbara Jane Newman is an American medievalist, literary critic, religious historian, and author. She is Professor of English and Religion, and John Evans Professor of Latin, at Northwestern University. Newman was elected in 2017 to the American Philosophical Society.
Michelle Marder Kamhi is an independent scholar and critic of the arts. She co-edits Aristos with her husband, Louis Torres, and is the author of Who Says That’s Art? A Commonsense View of the Visual Arts (2014) and Bucking the Artworld Tide: Reflections on Art, Pseudo Art, Art Education & Theory (2020). She also co-authored What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand (2000) with Torres. Kamhi has written on all the fine arts, but her particular focus is on the visual arts and art education. Throughout her work, she argues for a traditional view of art. But she differs from other conservative critics in regarding the invention of abstract painting and sculpture in the early twentieth century as the "decisive turning point in the breakdown of the concept of art."
Feminist rhetoric emphasizes the narratives of all demographics, including women and other marginalized groups, into the consideration or practice of rhetoric. Feminist rhetoric does not focus exclusively on the rhetoric of women or feminists, but instead prioritizes the feminist principles of inclusivity, community, and equality over the classic, patriarchal model of persuasion that ultimately separates people from their own experience. Seen as the act of producing or the study of feminist discourses, feminist rhetoric emphasizes and supports the lived experiences and histories of all human beings in all manner of experiences. It also redefines traditional delivery sites to include non-traditional locations such as demonstrations, letter writing, and digital processes, and alternative practices such as rhetorical listening and productive silence. According to author and rhetorical feminist Cheryl Glenn in her book Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope (2018), "rhetorical feminism is a set of tactics that multiplies rhetorical opportunities in terms of who counts as a rhetor, who can inhabit an audience, and what those audiences can do." Rhetorical feminism is a strategy that counters traditional forms of rhetoric, favoring dialogue over monologue and seeking to redefine the way audiences view rhetorical appeals.
The grievance studies affair was the project of a team of three authors—Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose—to highlight what they saw as poor scholarship and erosion of standards in several academic fields. Taking place over 2017 and 2018, their project entailed submitting bogus papers to academic journals on topics from the field of critical social theory such as cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to determine whether they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication. Several of these papers were subsequently published, which the authors cited in support of their contention.
