2023/2024

Claudia Verhoeven, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of History

Cornell University

Born in 1972 in Leiden, the Netherlands
Studied Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley and History at the University of California, Los Angeles

Arbeitsvorhaben

Love and Terror: A Revolutionary History of the Manson Murders

My project is a history of the 1969 Manson murders, an infamous criminal case in 20th-century U.S. history that has entranced the American public for half a century. This case has long been a classic of true crime and a touchstone of popular culture, but my work aims to make the Manson materials appear as an exemplary site for historical scholarship. It does this by taking a methodologically kaleidoscopic approach – explicitly moving from legal history in one chapter to cultural history in another, then political, intellectual, spatial, environmental, etc. – and by borrowing insights from philosophy, political theory, anthropology, and religious studies. Importantly, while my project is an American history based on years of empirical research, its argumentation is shaped by my background in philosophy, my training in modern Russian/European cultural-intellectual history, and my work on the long, global history of terror/ism. Thus, rather than intervening specifically in U.S. historiography, my book takes up the Manson murders as a historical case with which to think through a set of universal questions about the nature of authority, charisma, terror, myth, apocalypticism, and the Anthropocene.

Recommended Reading

Verhoeven, Claudia. The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.
—. “Time of Terror, Terror of Time: On the Impatience of Russian Revolutionary Terrorism (Early 1860s – Early 1880s).” In “Modern Times? Terrorism in Late Imperial Russia,” edited by Anke Hilbrenner and Frithjof B. Schenk, special issue, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 58, no. 2 (2010): 254–273.
—. “Epilogue: Shock and Awe, Terrorism and Theory.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism, edited by Carola Dietze and Claudia Verhoeven, 691–711. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.