Grace Lee Boggs (1913-2013): Radical American Pragmatist

FAIN: FT-286354-22

Molly Farneth
Haverford College (Haverford, PA 19041-1392)

Archival research and writing of a journal article, leading to a book-length intellectual biography of civil rights scholar-activist Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015).

I am seeking an NEH summer stipend to support archival research and early writing toward an intellectual biography of Grace Lee Boggs, one of the most significant democratic activists and intellectuals of the 20th-century U.S. The project will situate Boggs in a radical American pragmatist tradition, a tradition that runs from John Dewey and Jane Addams to Cornel West. I will consider the philosophical roots of Boggs’s theory of social change in Hegel, Marx, and the American pragmatists; the practices of conversation and disagreement among political friends that generated and sustained what she called “dialectical humanism”; and the spiritual dimensions of her thought and praxis. Building on recent scholarship on Boggs, I will consider the development of Boggs’s thought and explore her insights into the formation of communities capable of political friendship and spiritual transformation.