Professor Teaches History, Becomes Part of History
Lou Rose
Title: Professor of History and Political Science
Department: History & Political Science
Professor Lou Rose not only teaches history, but he recently became part of history when he took over as editor of the psychoanalytical journal, American Imago, in its centennial year. Founded by Sigmund Freud as Imago in Vienna in 1912, this journal was reborn as American Imago in the United States in 1939. It is uniquely multidisciplinary in its approach.
How did a history professor become editor of a psychoanalytical journal? Rose has conducted extensive research into the history of psychoanalysis as a way of studying culture, particularly in Vienna in the first half of the 20th century. He has written two books on the subject: The Survival of Images: Art Historians, Psychoanalysts, and the Ancients (2001) and The Freudian Calling: Early Viennese Psychoanalysis and the Pursuit of Cultural Science (1998), which won the 1999 Austrian Cultural Institute Prize for Best Book in Austrian Studies. He has even had an article published in American Imago: "Interpreting Propaganda: Successors to Warburg and Freud in Wartime." In addition to his research, Rose is a trustee of the Sigmund Freud Archives in the Library of Congress.
According to its literature, the journal "joins psychoanalytic thinking in scholarly studies in politics, the visual arts, literary culture, law and society and more - encompassing both contemporary and historical contexts." Rose strongly supports the multidisciplinary approach of American Imago. So when choosing a staff to work with him, Rose reached out to colleagues Paul Eisenstein, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, and Karen Steigman, assistant professor of English. Both have longstanding research interests in psychoanalytic topics and bring unique disciplinary perspectives to the journal.
During its 100-year history, the journal has published contributions by the Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann, the Pulitzer Prize-winning psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, and the creator of the Holocaust documentary Shoah, Claude Lanzmann. Eisenstein is the author of Traumatic Encounters: Holocaust Representation and the Hegelian Subject and Steigman recently published "The Literal American: Re-reading Graham Greene in an Age of Security" in the journal College Literature.