Dr Eric Olund

• the cultural and legal production and regulation of race, gender and sexuality
• the sensory culture and geography of governmentality
• urban life in the Progressive-era United States
• critical theory (with a small 'c')—especially Benjamin, Bergson, Butler, Connolly, Deleuze, Dewey, Foucault, James

Current research

I am interested in the ways social reformers have historically attempted to regulate race in the United States at the intersection of cultural practice and public policy.

I have researched both the 'Indian Reform' movement of the 1880s and the regulation of cinema in the 1910s as projects that produced and regulated whiteness, and in particular a whiteness that was fully imbricated with a particular vision of heterosexuality.

In addition to focusing on how geographies of race have been sexualized, I look to the ways these cultural-political geographies informed debates at the time over the appropriate role of the state in the increasing regulation of society characteristic of the time, and the alternative, cultural modes of regulation proposed and tried by social reformers.

My work is very much a history of the present, and because debates over state and cultural regulation then resonate with similar debates today, I have also sought to show how such racialised regulatory geographies have reactivated in the present, specifically in the War on Terror.

I am expanding my research into these questions in three directions:

• The settlement house movement in the Progressive-era US; while recent research has focused on the internal practice and performance of settlements in the assimilation of immigrants to 'Americanism' (ie whiteness), their place in the larger city has yet to be explored in these terms. Specifically I am interested in the ways settlement house workers extended their educational and social-welfare activities through outreach programs and interactions with municipal governments, and the ways their activities along with those of their charges were racialised and sexualised.
• The regulation of prostitution in tandem with the above; with the increasing public presence of women in US cities at the turn of the last century, a moral panic over so-called white slavery led to a radical policy shift from semi-official tolerance in red-light districts to what we would term today a zero-tolerance policy. I am interested in the ways both social reformers and average citizens appear to have racialised prostitution itself as white, while racialising the spaces in which it occurred as black, and the material, geographical aspects of this shift in terms of regulating race and gender.
• The connections between social reformers in the US and UK; American reformers came from a voluntarily mobile segment of the middle class, and they often travelled to the UK and personally knew and were often related to British reformers, and so I plan to extend my research in a comparative direction by tracing the trans-Atlantic translations of reformist practices in the context of broadly similar gender politics yet starkly different racial and class politics.