In this episode of the Past is Present podcast we speak with Susanna Blumenthal, a professor in the law school and the Department of History at the University of Minnesota and AAS-NEH Fellow at the Society during the 2016-17 academic year. Susanna’s most recent book, Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture, was published in 2016 by Harvard University Press. Susanna has published widely on psychiatry, consciousness, and the law, and her current project is an examination of the ways that American capitalism is intimately tied to fraud.
In this interview Susanna discusses everything from her early years as a graduate student in the law school and History Department at Yale, where she worked with David Brion Davis, to the philosophical foundations of her first book. She also talks about the important role AAS played in her efforts to understand critical legal cases having to do with fraud in the nineteenth-century U.S.