Crowds

Crowds explores the key role assumed by human multitudes in modern life by means of a graphically innovative, multi-author volume in which essays, word histories, and personal testimonies are woven together into a multiperspectival and multilayered group portrait. The portrait in question includes analyses of market crowds, crowds in modern art and literature, modern assemblies as compared to their premodern and ancient counterparts, modern sports crowds, human multitudes and mass media such as photography and cinema, crowds as political actors, and the emergence of crowd-centered discourses in social sciences such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Contributors include Stefan Jonsson, Allen Guttmann, Susanna Elm, John Plotz, Christine Poggi, William Egginton, Haun Saussy, Joan Ramon Resina, and Charles Tilly, with testimonies by authors such as Greil Marcus, Richard Rorty, Michel Serres, Alain Schnapp, Michael Hardt, T. J. Clark, and Susan Buck-Morss. The book represents the main output of one of the Stanford Humanities Lab's prototype "Big Humanities" projects and is supported by an extensive website (http://crowds.stanford.edu) which includes virtual galleries, video capture of the November 2005 Crowds seminar, and a database of early social science readings on modern crowds.

Jeffrey T. Schnapp is Director of the Stanford Humanities Laboratory. He is the author, most recently, of Building Fascism, Communism, Democracy: Gaetano Ciocca—Builder, Inventor, Farmer, Writer, Engineer (Stanford University Press, 2003). Matthew Tiews is the Associate Director of the Stanford Humanities Center.