Gary Gerstle, the 2024–2025 Joy Foundation Fellow, will present this year's Julia S. Phelps Annual Lecture in the Arts and Humanities.

Gerstle will look beyond the figure of Donald Trump to inquire into the roots of America’s authoritarian turn. His lecture will dissect how a neoliberal political order, focusing on free markets and limited regulation and dominant in the United States and abroad since the 1990s, widened economic inequality, stirred ethnoracial resentments, and raised doubts about the capacity of liberal democratic regimes to fix what had gone wrong. Gerstle will explore why the unraveling of this political order in the 2010s energized the authoritarian right more than the democratic left, and will conclude with some thoughts about where Americans might look for democratic renewal.