Asheesh Kapur Siddique, assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, is a historian of early America and the early modern Atlantic world and is currently completing a book about knowledge and governance in the early modern British empire. In this virtual talk, Siddique argues that the mode of constitution-making inaugurated in the aftermath of the American Revolution represented not an invention of written constitutionalism--as is often claimed--but instead a revision of the relationship between document and statecraft in early modern Europe. What made the US Constitution different wasn’t that it was written; rather it was the particular concept of written-ness that it embodied.
This event is hosted by Symposium on the Book, which is supported by the Willson Center for Humanities & Arts, the University of Georgia Libraries, and the UGA Department of English.
Registration is required for this event: https://tinyurl.com/UGAConstitutionDay