05/13/2026
As the nation’s 250th birthday approaches, our retired colleague and longtime early Americanist Dennis Moore has been reflecting on the more than 70 interdisciplinary roundtables he has cooked up at an amazing array of scholarly conferences. https://english.fsu.edu/article/reflecting-70-colloquies
Twenty-nine Novembers ago, he organized and led a discussion of Lawrence Levine’s "The Opening of the American Mind," which offered a dynamic response to Allan Bloom’s book "The Closing of the American Mind." He staged that session at the interdisciplinary American Studies Association's annual conference, in 1997 in Washington. The A.S.A.’s “History and Past Conferences” webpage refers specifically to that roundtable as one of a handful of “overflow crowds”(!)
As the linked commentary above shows, Dennis organized and led dozens more of these interdisciplinary roundtables at meetings of numerous scholarly organizations, two of which he served as president along the way: the Society of Early Americanists and SASA, the southeastern regional affiliate of the A.S.A. He also founded the A.S.A.'s Early American Matters Caucus, which morphed into the Early Americas Caucus.
In early 2019 he had retired from FSU to become fulltime caregiver for his fiancée, Barbara Stevens Heusel, who had taught a number of courses in our Department. They married that spring, and she passed away five years later.
Currently he has been getting back into circulation, supporting the Alzheimer's Project, serving on the Advisory Board of FSU’s Civil Rights Institute (which he had been involved in helping to design at the time of his retirement) and, once again, as an elected member of SASA’s Board.
Congratulations, Dennis!
Photo caption, from left to right: Dennis Moore, author Imani Perry ("More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States"), and Barbara Stevens Heusel.
See more information in the linked commentary.
