Jennifer Burns: belief

Transcript context

…Very last question or set of questions: What will you do next? That’s a great question. I have a couple of book projects in mind. One is to just look back a little bit more, rather than write a biography of an essential figure, to put them together into a broader story of the intellectual history of American conservatism or something like that. That’s one. More of a synthetic history, I would say. There’s been such an outpouring of literature on the subject. Some days I think it would be fun to bring it all together. Other days I think it’s going to be maybe not so fun [laughs] to have to pick through all that. I’m also interested in writing sort of a history of postmodernism because I’ve been teaching an intellectual history class here at Stanford that’s been tracing it across the century, and I think that’s potentially really interesting. It would be quite different than what I’ve done thus far. I’ll have to wait and see — do I want to strike out for new terrain or keep plowing the field I’m in? Stay tuned, is all I have to say on that. [laughs] Just one follow-up question on that. Many of us observing history have the sense that the intellectual tradition within the American right has been in decline for several decades. (A) Do you agree? (B) If so, what, most fundamentally, is driving that change?…

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