William J. Kenan, Jr., Professor of History; Professor of History
Princeton University, Ph.D. 1964

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Research Interests:

Social and cultural theory; history of selfhood and subjectivity; relations between art and society.

Selected Works:

The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Marx's Fate: The Shape of a Life, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1978; paperback edition, Penn State Press, 1990

Bohemian Paris. Culture, Politics and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930, New York, Elisabeth Sifton Books/Viking Penguin, 1986. Paper edition, Penguin,1987. New paper edition, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation and the Self in Modern Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1995; paper ed., 1997).

"Autonomy and Personality in Durkheim," Journal of the History of Ideas XLVIII (1987), 483-507

"The Human Subject as a Language-Effect," History of European Ideas 18, no. 4 (1994), 481-95.

"The Subjectivity of Structure: Individuality and its Contradictions in Lévi-Strauss," in Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics and the Psyche, ed. Michael S. Roth (Stanford, 1994), 349-68.

"Problematizing the Self," in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, ed. Lynn Hunt and Victoria Bonnell (Berkeley and L.A., 1999).

Book Prize:

Selma B Forkosch prize for the best article in the Journal of the History of Ideas, 1987, for "Autonomy and Personality in Durkheim."

Bohemian Paris nominated as one of five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, 1987.

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