Plans on the Planet
October 23, 2025, 12 pm EST
300S Buell Hall and online
Jonathan Levy (UChicago)
Courtney Bender (Columbia)
A response by Chelsea Spencer (Columbia)
The finitude of planet earth as a natural resource became especially evident in the late 20th Century. In these talks, the scale of the planetary is redesigned in multiple registers, from religion to capital, from urbanity to secularism. Jonathan Levy takes Houston, a largely unzoned city built mostly after 1970, as a scalar test for writing the history of climate change, featuring the financial and architectural imagination of the Hines company. Courtney Bender investigates the secular interests that rebuilt and reorganized religion in the 20th Century via planning, including at the 1939 World’s Fair.
Speakers:
Courtney Bender is the Ada Byron Bampton Tremaine Professor in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary American religious life. A sociologist and ethnographer by training, she is the author of the award-winning The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination, and Heaven’s Kitchen: Living Religion at God’s Love We Deliver, and has co-edited or contributed to volumes focused on the sociological study of religion, critical themes in religious studies, religious pluralism, and secularism.
Jonathan Levy is the James Westfall Thompson Professor of History at the University of Chicago, and in 2025 will become Professor of History at Sciences Po in Paris. A historian of the economy, the United States, and capitalism, he is the author of The Real Economy: History and Theory (Princeton UP, 2025), Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (Random House, 2021), and Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Harvard, 2012)
Chelsea Spencer is the 2025–2027 Buell Center Research and Teaching Fellow. She is a historian of modern architecture, architectural media, and economic life. Her current book project traces the rise of general contracting in the United States during the long nineteenth century, a period known in legal history as the age of contract.