Links from the show:
About my guest:
Maurizio Valsania is professor of American history at the University of Turin, Italy. An expert on the Early American Republic, he analyzes the founders within their social, intellectual, and material context, especially through the lens of the 18th-century body. He is the author of The Limits of Optimism: Thomas Jefferson’s Dualistic Enlightenment (University of Virginia Press, 2011), Nature’s Man: Thomas Jefferson’s Philosophical Anthropology (University of Virginia Press, 2013), Jefferson’s Body: A Corporeal Biography (University of Virginia Press, 2017), and First Among Men: George Washington and the Myth of American Masculinity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022, a book represented by literary agent Scott Mendel of the Mendel Media Group). Valsania is the recipient of several fellowships from leading academic institutions, including the American Antiquarian Society, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Library Company, the John D. Rockefeller Library, the DAAD (Germany), the International Center for Jefferson Studies, and the George Washington’s Mount Vernon. He has written for the Oxford University Press’s Academic Insights for the Thinking World, for the Oxford Bibliographies Online, and has collaborated with the BBC World Service. He has also written several Op-Eds and articles that have appeared in major media outlets, such as the Chicago Tribune, the Mississippi Free Press, Salon, the Wisconsin State Journal, Government Executive, Defense One, and the Conversation. He lives in Chapel Hill, NC.
First Among Men: George Washington and the Myth of American Masculinity