Casey Blake

By Sona Wink

Illustration by Phoebe Wagoner

I was a jittery sophomore sitting in a hardwood Pupin chair. Professor Casey Blake, standing before a crowd of us, popped open a can of Diet Coke. In standard form, he commenced a methodical, crystal-clear lecture, delivered in perfect sentences from memory. On the screen was an image of Jane Addams, a juggernaut in Professor Blake’s popular US Intellectual History 1865-Present (USIH) lecture. 

That lecture lit me on fire. I first visited Professor Blake’s high-ceilinged, book-stuffed office to ask him about Addams. I have since had the privilege of getting to know him beyond his lecture: I worked as his research assistant in 2022, and then as a teaching assistant for Freedom and Citizenship, a summer program for New York City high school students that he founded in 2009. I came to learn that Professor Blake is extraordinarily kind. He is generous and attentive to undergraduates; he is a close mentor to the PhD students that he advises. He tends to make self-deprecating jokes.

As we spoke in his office, Addams’s memoir Forty Years at Hull-House sat on the otherwise empty table between us; her ideas undergirded much of our conversation. Addams felt there was a gap between the philosophy she had learned in college and the practical needs of most Americans. Her life’s work involved forming an egalitarian community that was accessible to both working-class immigrants and elite academics. It is striking to me how this very description applies to the work that Professor Blake has done over the course of his career. While an astute, accomplished academic, Blake is also, by his own description, a unique form of community organizer. As founder of Columbia’s American Studies department, he created a lively, egalitarian forum where faculty, staff, and students from disparate areas of university life could exchange ideas and form connections. Freedom and Citizenship placed low-income, first-generation high schoolers into a rigorous political philosophy seminar and asked them to harness those lessons for a civic engagement project—applying theory to practice. 

Professor Blake plans to retire in June 2026. While he intends to return to teach one class per semester, this is likely his last time teaching USIH. I realized after our conversation that I had inadvertently structured my questions to mirror that of an USIH lecture: I sought to understand Blake’s upbringing, his education, and the ideas that have animated his career. I unconsciously situated him in the lineage of thinkers that he has devoted his career to. Along the way, I learned that he has a cat and used to write poetry as a hobby. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

…

B&W: The basics. Where did you grow up?

CB: I grew up here in New York … My mother and I moved around a little bit, but we were always in the Yorkville neighborhood. 

B&W: What did your parents do?

CB: My father was a modern architect and critic of some renown and some significance. He was also editor of the Architectural Forum, which was the most prestigious architecture magazine of the post-war period. His name was Peter Blake … My mother was a fashion stylist, and she worked for seventeen or eighteen years at Life magazine in the fashion department. 

It was a very artistically oriented family, and to some extent, also an intellectual family … Looking back, it was quite an unusual milieu in which I grew up. It was also a political family, a left-leaning family, not communist, but socialists and social democrats. There were also people in our orbit who were anarchists and anarcho-pacifists, sort of part of the milieu. So there was a fair amount of talk about politics, especially since this was in the 1960s and 70s, when politics was unavoidable.

B&W: What were you like as a young person?

CB: I suppose I was always a rather bookish boy and young person … very engaged in the political upheavals of the day. Growing up in New York, I was precocious, and so my friends and I attended all the anti-war demonstrations and so on. 

B&W: Where did you go to undergraduate and graduate school?

CB: I went to Wesleyan University as an undergraduate, and then I went to the University of Rochester as a grad student.

B&W: When you were at Wesleyan, what books, classes, or professors were most influential for you?

CB: A very important professor for me was John Paoletti, an art historian, a major historian of Renaissance art, and I would say, hands down, the best teacher I’ve ever encountered. He set the bar very high; I’ve always sort of aspired to get close … I think that he sent me in a particular direction, thinking about art in its social context, thinking about art as part of public culture. 

At that point in the early and mid-1970s I just assumed that any modern, thinking, person who wanted to make sense of modernity had to know about Freud and Marx, and so I took a pretty deep dive into psychoanalysis and Marxism, broadly conceived.

B&W: What made John Paoletti a good teacher, and what about him do you try to emulate?

CB: Well, he was a brilliant and inspiring lecturer. He spoke quickly; he didn't read a lecture. He had lecture notes, but clearly was learned and witty, and elegant in his self presentation—I certainly haven’t emulated that. (B&W: laughs) But also generous and warm one-on-one. 

B&W: Perhaps this brings us into your time at graduate school—how did you end up doing American intellectual history, specifically?

CB: After graduating from college, I lived for a year in Spain. I was very left in my orientation in this period. I was studying—and this is the late 1970s—what was then known as Euro-communism … I was following political debates in the US, post-New Left political debates. 

Without much counsel from my undergraduate teachers about which programs to apply to—I really didn’t know what I was doing, quite frankly—I made decisions based on which ideas most appealed to me … I followed the debates among historians on the left in that period, and was drawn to the work of Christopher Lasch, who ended up being my mentor and friend, and also Eugene Genovese, who was at Rochester at the time. Rochester was a center for Marxist historiography … Without ever having set foot in Rochester, New York before, or even communicating with all those people, I accepted Rochester’s offer.

What I experienced there was very unusual—it was completely different than the graduate program at Columbia, or maybe anywhere else. The graduate program at Columbia now, and I'm sure back in the day, is very professional. It’s preparing you to be a professional historian, and it does it very well. There’s a lot to be said for that approach. The Rochester program … was more like going to graduate school to be an intellectual. 

B&W: That sounds amazing.

CB: There was a sense that those of us who were there in graduate school, especially those working with [Lasch], that the work that we were doing had something to do with how one should live one’s life … That was a distinctive feature of the milieu at Rochester, very unusual in that regard, because it was a smaller program and because it was removed from New York and the Ivies. 

It had a very unusual aspect to it … more communal. Christopher Lasch and his wife Nell created a community in their home that included grad students, colleagues, neighbors, their children’s teachers and so on.  When I think of the teachers to whom I am deeply indebted, it would be John Paoletti and Christopher Lasch. I couldn’t have asked for better mentors than those two. Very different people, I should say, but quite remarkable influences. 

B&W: What was Christopher Lasch like as a person and friend, and how did his interests influence yours?

CB: He was reserved and proper, but once one got to know him, one realized that he was a man of humor and generosity … His lecturing style was really entirely different from what I encountered and admired in John Paoletti. He read his lectures, and his lectures were beautifully crafted essays. When all is said and done, Lasch was a writer above all else, and a very gifted writer.

I encountered [Lasch] at an interesting moment in his career, and that was intellectually exciting for me as well. He had spent the 1970s engaged with the Frankfurt School in particular—that current of Marxist theory. By the time I arrived there, he was moving away from the issues that had preoccupied him for much of the 1970s and was interested in reading radical thinkers outside of the Marxist tradition, and I was too. We shared a lot of reading together. I would feed him things that I thought he would find of interest, and vice versa. 

I was very interested, and remain interested, in romantic radicals and romantic anti-capitalists, like Ruskin and Morris and that whole tradition. I passed things on to him by those thinkers. I remember he and I read Arendt—this was reading outside of the classroom. I remember reading Habermas. 

B&W: Lasch was one of my favorite readings we did in Intellectual History. 

CB: Oh, good. 

B&W: I was amazed to learn that you were so close with him. 

CB: He became very interested in the populist tradition, and in his big book, which he saw as his magnum opus and the culmination of his career, The True and Only Heaven, he tried to bring together this populist tradition with a certain strain of romantic Protestantism. He synthesized them into a radical critique of the ideology of progress. In his view, it was an ideology that had begun with the earliest liberal political economists, Smith and others, that defined human beings in terms of their wants and their desires—a kind of limitless desire, and therefore authorized the creation of a vast economic apparatus to satisfy those ever expanding desires. Lasch was always a critic of consumer culture.  The 20th century consumer culture had its roots there and in a religion of technological progress. He traced a tradition that was localist in orientation … He combined this tradition with a religious tradition that emphasized hope over progress, and limits over a belief in limitlessness and perfectibility.

B&W: The combination you’re describing of romantic anti-capitalism and localism reminds me of the kind of intellectual throughline that you described between the four protagonists of Beloved Community. If this was a focus of Lasch, is this an interest of yours as well? 

CB: I suppose this drew me to Lasch without my thinking through really at the time. I’ve always had an interest in thinkers who don’t fit neatly into familiar ideological categories. 

B&W: Me too.

CB: Lasch encouraged me to read Lewis Mumford’s social theory. A figure like Mumford is Hannah Arendt, who certainly doesn’t fit into easily identifiable political categories. Paul Goodman was very conservative in his approach to education in particular, but also an anarchist in his politics—communitarian anarchist. There are other contemporary thinkers one might consider in this way: Marilynne Robinson, Wendell Berry. 

But I’ve also come to realize that certain figures who I admire, who are often considered liberal or progressive icons, need to be understood as combining elements of a certain cultural conservatism with political reformism or radicalism. Certainly Jane Addams—I was just looking at her memoir [gestures to a heavily sticky-noted copy of Forty Years at Hull-House, which sits on the table between us]. She strikes me as such a figure; also Walter Rauschenbusch, the founder of the social gospel movement and a huge influence on King. The social gospel is important to me personally. In both cases, political intervention that might be conceived as broadly progressive was made in the name of defending what might be called non-political values, right? 

This was a line of argument I had already encountered as an undergraduate, when I was reading figures like Camus—we read a lot of existentialists—and even Orwell. In both cases, there's an argument that politics was inescapable, given the times they were living in, but one entered into politics in order to safeguard values and ways of living in the world that were not political. This seems like a paradoxical position, but I think it’s an important one. 

One of the really disturbing features of the American political scene and the cultural scene, including at universities, that I’ve witnessed in the last twenty years, is the way in which many leading figures on the political right—we see this very vividly with Trump and his movement—and to my mind, much of what now passes for the academic left in the humanities, are actually brothers and sisters under the skin. They both believe that education, the arts, and culture generally, are essentially delivery systems for political ideology, often of the crudest sort. Everything essentially becomes understood as a site for political warfare. 

I’ve long felt that this feedback loop between the Trumpist right and its erstwhile adversaries has been very destructive of culture, of the arts, of intellectual life, and of everyday life in general. Now we’re seeing it hit us with full force. I’ve been interested in those thinkers who have thought about their political interventions as a way of safeguarding certain values and ways of living that shouldn’t be reduced to the clash of power against power. 

B&W: I have a bit of an obsession with Black Mountain College and the Greenwich Village scene, both of which you describe in the US Intellectual History lecture. I’m so jealous of those people—they’re in this bubbling hotbed of intellectual creation. I’m curious, because you’re familiar with a lot of these different scenes in America: What are the ingredients or prerequisites for a scene to flourish? What are commonalities between the contexts that birthed them? 

CB: Well, Randolph Bourne wrote an essay titled “The Experimental Life.” I think that the idea of the experimental life, which is not altogether different from the idea of living life as art, is something one finds in the Greenwich Village scene and also Black Mountain College. I think that what Black Mountain was able to do, that the Greenwich Village scene might not have been able to do, is ground that in an educational project. It was Black Mountain College—it was a liberal arts college that, in some respects, had the arts at the center of the curriculum, and that gave it a focus and a grounding that the Greenwich Village scene did not have. What those two scenes did have in common … was an exciting dialogue between American cultural and intellectual traditions and European traditions. That is certainly the case at Black Mountain. This is too simple, but in some respects, it was the place where Deweyan pragmatism and Bauhaus-inspired modernism met.

B&W: I have heard you describe a lot of intellectuals with a historian’s objective lens, which is appropriate in a lecture context or beyond. I am noticing that there is some intersection between the people you are interested in as a historian and the people that you are interested in because you feel allegiance to their political values. How do you navigate the boundary between being a historian and being an intellectual?

CB: One of the things that I always find—and teaching the intellectual history course is important in this regard—is that many of the people who we read in that course, and many people who I have read over the years, are good traveling companions, intellectual traveling companions. I am, in my mind, often engaged in a dialogue with them. My estimation of many of those figures has changed over the years. I don’t think the same way that I did when I was thirty years old about certain figures. 

The course that you took with me has evolved and taken many different forms … It is a living tradition that is part of my life … But I don’t necessarily think that there is an immediate political payoff to what has been for me an intense, decades-long engagement with these thinkers. It has led me to view a certain kind of political rhetoric, especially within the academy, with some skepticism.

B&W: Could you provide an example of that?

CB: This connects to what I was saying earlier about what I see as a feedback loop between the Trumpist right and some of what passes for the left in the academy. The politics of cheerleading and name-calling is of no interest to me, and the politics of outrage is of limited interest to me. There are many reasons to be outraged, now more than ever, but a constant emotional tenor of outrage can disable thinking, in my view. 

What I want to say, though, is that some of these ideas have informed my programmatic work at Columbia, both with the Center for American Studies and with the Freedom and Citizenship Program. I didn’t plan it this way, but as I look back on some of what I’ve done at Columbia, I realized that I was a kind of community organizer within the university. This was hardly something I had planned on. 

B&W: How cool. 

CB: But it kind of turned out that way—not a community organizer in the way this is ordinarily understood … but within the context of the university, creating sort of counter-cultural communities, right?

B&W: How so? Are you referring to Freedom and Citizenship and American Studies, or—

CB: The Center for American Studies as well, but also on a micro level—the kind of community of grad students who I have been so fortunate to teach, who have not only been my dissertation students, but who have been teaching assistants for the intellectual history course. The course has served to make it possible for those students to know one another and share their ideas … treating those people as colleagues, not as students. 

I think one of the things that I tried to do as director of the Center for American Studies—and I was not the only director, of course, Andrew Delbanco was also director—I really tried to create an intellectually serious but egalitarian community, and a community in which regular tenure-track and tenured faculty, lecturers, adjuncts, grad students, and staff were all treated as equals—as colleagues. I was the boss—it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise—but I didn’t shove it down everybody’s throat. When I think back on that time, if you walked into that little suite of offices in Hamilton Hall on a given afternoon, you would find faculty of different kinds; lecturers, adjuncts, tenured faculty, staff, the graduate student advisors, undergraduate majors, the Freedom and Citizenship high school kids, the Freedom and Citizenship TAs. It was bursting at the seams; it was very lively, and it was a different kind of atmosphere than one finds when one walks into the usual departmental office … It was a community that people wanted to be part of. The students who were attracted to the major and to the program and to working in Freedom and Citizenship, like you, understood that it was something different from what they found elsewhere. 

I had this idea as director of the Center and as founding director of Freedom and Citizenship that we’re in New York, and we should take seriously that this is Columbia University in the City of New York. That’s the official name of the university. It would be exciting and important to try to create a dialogue and ongoing exchange between what goes on here and what goes on out there. One way of doing this—and Andy Delbanco was instrumental here—was to bring distinguished practitioners in the arts, and law, and politics, and other realms into the classroom to teach undergraduates. Another way of doing this, and this was important to me, was to launch a civic engagement curriculum where students would be engaged in traditional academic work and combine that with practical work in the community. Finally Freedom and Citizenship is, in some ways, the linchpin of this vision I had of the Center as a site for civic engagement. It was a pretty unusual place, physically and intellectually. 

I didn’t do it single-handedly. I had a lot of support from fellow faculty and students and others. Virtually no support from the administration, but that’s the way things go—in Columbia especially. I take satisfaction in what we all were able to accomplish … A discerning listener like you would probably be able to trace a throughline from the intellectual work I’ve done to the programmatic work. 

B&W: I keep thinking of John Dewey, Jane Addams, and William James’s attempt to unify theory and practice. 

CB: Yeah. Addams, a constant influence for Dewey; theory and practice for sure … For Addams, an idea that is powerfully expressed in her memoir, which I was just looking at, is that the intellectual culture of the time should not be the sole possession of a certain educated elite. I can even find the passages have been very inspiring to me. [He flips open Forty Years at Hull-House.] 

B&W: That book completely changed my life. 

CB: Yeah, I often find myself asking, "What would Jane do?" … Addams was many things, but she was an educator, and was thinking in innovative ways about education. Personally, I’ve been very interested in civic engagement initiatives at other colleges and universities and have been interested in places like Deep Springs College or the Gull Island Institute or Warren Wilson College in North Carolina or Berea College, where work and academic learning are joined … I think you got a taste of that.

B&W: I have some stupid questions. How do you spend a day off?

CB: Ay ay ay. I spend a fair amount of time taking advantage of the museum and cinephile cultures of New York. If I left New York, that would be what I most miss. I spend time with family and friends … I did have a period when I wrote poetry, but that impulse seems to have gotten into abeyance.

B&W: Oh. I’m sad to hear that. 

CB: Yeah. It might embarrass me to look at some of that. 

B&W: I’ve noticed that at the beginning of every lecture, you open a Diet Coke. 

CB: Laughs. Yeah, I feel the need to drink something, or that I want to have a beverage there. I’ve got so much going on that a caffeinated beverage seems appealing, right? It’s probably not very good for me. 

B&W: I’ve just noticed it seems like a ritual. 

CB: Yeah, maybe … There are probably better things to consume.

B&W: Kombucha? I don’t know. I think it’s nice. What are you going to miss most about working here? 

CB: A lot depends on how things proceed going forward. There is a strong possibility that I will continue teaching after retirement … It would give me the opportunity to stay in contact with young people and learn what you all are thinking and doing and so on. If I completely cut off contact from Columbia and embarked on another phase of my life, what I would most miss, without question, hands down, is the students. When people have asked me over the years, “What do you like most about working at Columbia?” I always say the students. I feel like I’ve been blessed to have known great undergraduates like yourself, and great graduate students. Many are interested in pursuing professional careers … But I think a lot of the students who end up in my orbit, for better or for worse, are intellectually curious in a somewhat different way. 

I certainly won’t miss meetings. I won’t miss the administration, right? So that will be fine to wash my hands of … Anything else? 

B&W: That’s all my questions. 

CB: I have a cat. Laughs.

B&W: Laughs. Anything you’d like to say? 

CB: No, but honestly, thank you. It’s very flattering to be invited to have this kind of a conversation … You and many of my other students, including my graduate students, have really made my life at Columbia better. And I don’t think students often realize how much that matters to faculty.

B&W: My operating assumption is that professors don’t notice I exist.

CB: I have a funny feeling, Sona, that more of your professors know you exist than you realize. 

B&W: Laughs. I don’t know. Okay.