Fall 2024 - Special Event, Thursday, October 17 @12PM, PAC 001

“Some articles from the Sandwich Islands”: New England Missionaries and Cultural Objects Collected in Hawai‘i and Exhibited in Boston, 1820-1895

Thursday, October 17 @ 12PM in PAC 001

Members of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) arrived in Hawai‘i in 1820 and immediately began to send information and cultural objects back to their home office in Boston. It took another twenty years for the ABCFM to build “Missionary House” in Boston’s Pemberton Square, with a dedicated hall to display their growing “Cabinet of Curiosities.” Instructions to gather “articles from heathen countries, illustrative of their religions, manners, and customs,” were sent to the Board’s global network of missionaries, and the collection grew to include more than 3500 cultural objects. Along with texts that appeared in newspapers, pamphlets, and books (including one intended to introduce the museum cabinet to children), the objects were used to spread a racist agenda that demeaned Indigenous people, promoted an urgent need to convert them to Christianity, and sought funds to accomplish the mission. Today some 300 pieces from the collection—all from Hawai‘i and other islands in Oceania—are known to have survived the dispersal of the collection in 1895, and are at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu.

In this illustrated lecture, Mary Malloy will describe the collections at the ABCFM Museum in Boston, and put them in the context of the larger world of New England voyages to the Pacific, and the growth of museums in the region in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Mary Malloy taught in the Museum Studies Program at Harvard for a decade, and in the SEA Semester program in Woods Hole for twenty-five years. She was an educator at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, and is currently an Associate of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard. Mary earned a Master’s degree in Museum Studies and a Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University. 

Fall 2024 - Special Event, Friday, October 18 - Saturday, October 19 @ Beckham Hall

"Current Perspective on the History of Guns and Society" annual fall conference hosted by the Center for the Study of Guns & Society

Friday, October 18 - Saturday, October 19 @ Beckham Hall 

Scholars, public health and legal experts, film and museum professionals, and students from around the country will gather for two days of discussions on a wide range of historical topics related to firearms. Click here for full schedule details.

The Center for the Study of Guns & Society (CSGS) at Wesleyan University is, to our knowledge, the first academic center in the U.S. dedicated to interdisciplinary humanities study and teaching on the social and cultural history of firearms. Established in April 2022, the center is a hub for pioneering interdisciplinary research on a wide variety of topics in firearms history, including the technologies, manufacture, possession, and use of firearms; the social and cultural underpinnings of gun ownership; and the tolerance of high levels of gun violence in the U.S. relative to other countries. The center promotes academic reflection on the role history plays in making categories of contemporary debate around guns appear inevitable, natural, or culturally necessary, and supports scholarship and pedagogies that uncover hidden conflicts and contexts as a means of better understanding contemporary phenomena.

Fall 2024 - Special Event, Thursday, October 10 @ 4:30PM, PAC 100

The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492

Thursday, October 10 @ 4:30PM in PAC 100

It is often thought that animal domestication and agriculture are necessary and inevitable for human progress and that societies without domesticated animals are “primitive.” In her new book “The Tame and the Wild,” Marcy Norton reveals that this is an insidious myth. Instead, she explores the alternative paths chosen by Indigenous communities in their relationships with other animals and reveals how these “modes of interaction” guided responses to colonialism and even had transformative effects on European societies.

Marcy Norton is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.  She writes about the Atlantic World after 1492 with a particular focus on environmental history and the history of science.  Her publications include Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Cornell University Press, 2008) and, The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 (Harvard University Press, 2024).

Fall 2024 - Special Event, Friday, September 13 @ 4:30PM, COL Library (3rd floor, Boger Hall)

"Plastic History"

Friday, September 13 @ 4:30PM, COL Library (3rd floor, Boger Hall)

Ranjan Ghosh is known for his work on the inbetweenness of disciplines and for bringing his "trans(in)fusion approach" to bear on scholarly work that spans the fields of comparative literature,comparative philosophy, environmental humanities, critical and cultural theory,
and intellectual history.

His books include Thinking Literature across Continents (Duke UP, 2016, with J. Hillis Miller), Plastic Tagore (Oxford UP, 2024), and a trilogy designed to establish the discipline of plastic
humanities: The Plastic Turn (Cornell UP, 2022), Plastic Figures (Cornell UP, 2025), ano
Plastic Humanities (forthcoming)

Ranjan Ghosh is Professor at the Department of English, University of North Bengal in India.

Fall 2024 - Special Event, Monday, September 16 @ 4:30PM, PAC 001

"Recovering the Lost Worlds of Jewish Artist Rahel Szalit" 

Monday, September 16, 2024 @ 4:30PM in PAC 001

What strategies can we use to recover lives and artworks nearly lost to history—especially when there is little archival material available? This talk focuses on the process of rediscovering Rahel Szalit (1888–1942), one of the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Germany. Szalit was a sought-after illustrator and painter originally from Eastern Europe who was murdered in the Holocaust. She became known for her soulful, humorous illustrations of literature by Sholem Aleichem, Heine, Tolstoy, Dickens, Thomas Mann, and others. She published her work in the mainstream German and Jewish press, and she ran in artists’ and queer circles in 1920s Berlin and 1930s Paris. Szalit’s fascinating life demonstrates how women artists gained access to Jewish and avant-garde movements (Expressionism, New Objectivity) by experimenting with different media and genres.

Kerry Wallach is Professor and Chair of German Studies and an affiliate of the Jewish Studies Program at Gettysburg College. After majoring in the College of Letters at Wesleyan, she earned her PhD in German from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Traces of a Jewish Artist: The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit (2024) and Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany (2017), and co-editor (with Aya Elyada) of German-Jewish Studies: Next Generations.

Fall 2024 -Special Event, Tuesday, September 10, 2024 @ 12PM

"Richard Nixon, Donald Trump, and Us: The Politics of Forgiveness" 

Tuesday, September 10, 2024 @ 12:00PM in PAC100 (Pizza starting @11:55AM) 

The trauma of presidents is the trauma of nations. Can we heal? Historian Daniel Silliman, author of a new book on the spiritual struggles at the core of Richard Nixon’s life, argues that this fascinating story offers a way forward in healing the strife of our current political moment.

Dr. Daniel Silliman is the news editor of Christianity Today and the author of One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon's Search for Salvation. He earned his doctorate at the University of Heidelberg, in Germany, and has taught history and humanities at Heidelberg, the University of Notre Dame, Valparaiso University, and Milligan University. 

Spring 2024 -Special Event, Tuesday, April 2, 2024

"Dina Pronicheva, Actress and Holocaust Surviver - Rethinking Ukrainian Studies and the Embodied Experience of War" 

Tuesday, April 2, 2024 @ 4:30PM in PAC101

Dina Pronicheva is well-known as one of the few survivors of Babyn Iar, when the Nazis murdered over 30,000 Jews in two days in 1941. Her testimony has served scholars and courts for describing Nazi atrocities. Rarely discussed, however, is her work in theater. After Babyn Iar, it was her skills as an actress that helped her survive for over two years until liberation, passing as a non-Jew working in Ukrainian theatre. This lecture shows the importance of the Jewish experience that forms an inextricable part of the Ukrainian history, and the importance of Ukraine as a place in Jewish culture. Finally, Dina Pronicheva’s story suggests the embodied nature of theater and survival and offers much to consider in our understanding of life in wartime Ukraine today.

Dr. Mayhill C. Fowler is an associate professor in the Department of History at Stetson University. She has published widely on culture in Ukraine, including her book Beau Monde on Empire's Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine (Toronto, 2017). She is currently finishing a book on women in theater in Ukraine across the long 20^th century and re-thinking a project on Soviet military theater. She has held fellowships at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, the University of Toronto, and she was a Fulbright scholar to Ukraine 2019-2020. She is an affiliated researcher with the Center for Urban History in Lviv and affiliated faculty in the Program in Theater Studies at Ivan Franko National University. She is also a former actress.

Spring 2024 -Special Event, Wednesday, March 27, 2024

"The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects." 

Wednesday, March 27, 2024 @ 4:30PM in Allbritton 311

We welcome guest lecturer Brandon Schechter, who will be talking about the Red Army through objects. The Red Army was the largest force assembled in human history, defeating fascism in the course of the most destructive war humanity has known. Millions of diverse people – men and women, peasants and workers, Muslims and atheists – came together to defeat an enemy who wanted to enslave or annihilate them. A common set of objects was often all that separated these soldiers from civilians and the only thing uniting very different people in the ranks. This talk will look at how ordinary things can tell the story of an epic event and attempt to humanize the people who defeated fascism through looking at their everyday lives. In this talk Dr. Schechter discusses his award-winning book The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (Cornell University Press, 2019) which won the American Historical Association’s Paul Birdsall Prize in 2020. 

Brandon Schechter is the author of The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (2019). He’s a consultant at the Blavatnik Archive and has taught at Columbia, NYU, NYU Shanghai, Brown, and UC Berkley, where he recieved his Ph.D. Schechter received his B.A. in Russian Studies at Vassar College.

Spring 2024 -Special Event, Friday, February 23, 2024

"The Missionary Zeal: Liberal Arts Education and the Transformation of US-China Relations" 

Friday, February 23, 2024 

On Friday, February 23, 2024, scholars from nine liberal arts colleges across the nation will convene at Wesleyan University to explore how liberal arts education reshaped US-China relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by exploring the rich repositories of historical materials from their respective institutions. 

Spring 2024 -Special Event, Thursday, February 15, 2024

"Chivalry and Alterity at the Rennaissance Tournament" 

Thursday, February 15, 2024 @ 4:30PM in PAC 101

In sixteenth-century Europe, princes and nobles donned costumes and masks to impersonate warriors and kings from foreign lands. During this age of overseas expansion, equestrian tournaments became an activity for imagining and experiencing human difference, both cultural and embodied. If early masked tournaments focused especially on the rivalry between Christians and Muslims, later ones also represented participants from the Americas, Africa, and South Asia, seeking eventually to evoke the entire world. At this moment of intensified global interaction, the tournament—a festivity of medieval origin at which the old military elite celebrated its martial values—proved a remarkably flexible medium for interpreting the newly expanded world. It also, perhaps inevitably, served to assert European superiority. By expressing their understanding of human difference through equestrian exercises and masquerades, princes and nobles not only asserted their claim to rule but also shaped early European ideas about the world's people.

Alexander Bevilacqua is Associate Professor of History at Williams College. He studies the cultural and intellectual consequences of European expansion in the first global era, ca. 1500-1800. His book The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Harvard, 2018) won the Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. His scholarship has appeared in journals including Past and Present, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, and Journal of Modern History.

CANCELLED Fall 2023-Special Event, Tuesday, December 5

"The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects." 

Tuesday, December 5, 2023 @ 4:30PM in Allbritton 311

We welcome guest lecturer Brandon Schechter, who will be talking about the Red Army through objects. The Red Army was the largest force assembled in human history, defeating fascism in the course of the most destructive war humanity has known. Millions of diverse people – men and women, peasants and workers, Muslims and atheists – came together to defeat an enemy who wanted to enslave or annihilate them. A common set of objects was often all that separated these soldiers from civilians and the only thing uniting very different people in the ranks. This talk will look at how ordinary things can tell the story of an epic event and attempt to humanize the people who defeated fascism through looking at their everyday lives. In this talk Dr. Schechter discusses his award-winning book The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (Cornell University Press, 2019) which won the American Historical Association’s Paul Birdsall Prize in 2020. 

Brandon Schechter is the author of The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (2019). He’s a consultant at the Blavatnik Archive and has taught at Columbia, NYU, NYU Shanghai, Brown, and UC Berkley, where he recieved his Ph.D. Schechter received his B.A. in Russian Studies at Vassar College.

Fall 2023-Special Event, Tuesday, November 7

"The Liberatory Power of Guilt: How a Sikh Holy Town Shaped Utopian Dreams of Pakistan"

Tuesday, November 7th at 4:30 pm Judd 116

We welcome guest lecturer, Priya Satia. In this talk, Prof. Satia will explain how, in the era of British colonialism, environmental transformation of a Sikh holy site in a semi-arid region of Punjab became crucial to securing legitimacy in local political contests. The emerging town's particular spiritual culture went on to water various struggles for autonomy--including a vision of Pakistan as a state-sized "dera" (socio-religious residence of a spiritual leader) offering refuge and relief from colonial and casteist orders.

Priya Satia is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History and Professor of History at Stanford University. She is the author of three award-winning books: Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (OUP, 2008); Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Duckworth, 2018); Time's Monster: History, Conscience and Britain's Empire (Penguin, 2020). Her work can also be found in the American Historical Review, Past & Present, Technology & Culture, Humanity, and other scholarly journals and edited volumes. Prof. Satia writes frequently for popular media, such as the Washington Post, Time Magazine, The New Republic, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and other outlets.

Sponsored by the History Department, Fall 2023

Fall 2023-Special Event, Tuesday, October 3

"You Can Never Rest, Because They Keep Coming": On America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created

Tuesday, October 3 at 4:30 pm Boger 114

We welcome guest lecturer, Nick Tabor. Nick Tabor is the author of Africatown:  America's Last Slave Ship and the Community it Created.

Nick Tabor is the author of Africatown: America’s Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created, a blend of history and investigative journalism that traces the development of a neighborhood established by survivors of the last slave voyage to the US. He was a historical consultant on the documentary Descendant, which was presented on Netflix by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company in 2022. He previously worked at daily newspapers and on the editorial staff of New York Magazine. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.

Sponored by Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, The African American Studies Department, The History Department and the CSS 

Fall 2023-Special Lecture, Tuesday, September 26

"A Madman in the White House?  On Sigmund Freud's Unknown Diagnosis of Woodrow Wilson" 

Tuesday, September 26 at 4:30 pm Allbritton 311 

Join us for a talk by a well-known French Historian, Patrick Weil

Patrick Weil is a Florence Rogatz Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School, and a senior research fellow at the French National Research Center in the University of Paris1, Pantheon-Sorbonne. Professor Weil's work focuses on comparative immigration, citizenship, and church-state law and policy. His most recent books are The Madman in the White House. Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (Harvard University Press, 2023) and De La Laïcité en France (Grasset, 2021).

Patrick Weil is also, since 2006, the founder and the chairman of the NGO Libraries Without Borders (Bibliothèques Sans Frontières).

Sponsored by History Department, CSS and the Romance Languages and Literatures Department 

2023 MEIGS LECTURE - Tuesday, April 11 at 4:30 pm

Elizabeth Hinton, Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at Yale University, will deliver the annual Meigs Lecture in US History.

Tuesday, April 11 at 4:30 pm in Boger 114.

Elizabeth Hinton is a historian of American inequality who is considered one of the nation’s leading experts on policing and mass incarceration. Hinton’s past and current scholarship provides a deeper grasp of the persistence of poverty, urban violence, and racial inequality in the United States. She is a Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at Yale University.

Sponsored by the History Department, the Albritton Center for Public Life, the Department of African American Studies, the Center for African American Studies, and the American Studies Department.

Guest Lecturer Gregory Conti gives talk "How to think about Mill's On Liberty"

On Monday, April 10 at 4:30 pm in Boger 114, guest speaker Gregory Conti will give the talk:

"How to think about Mill's On Liberty"

Gregory Conti is assistant professor of politics at Princeton. His research focuses on the history of modern political thought, especially in Britain and France, and on the lessons that can be drawn from that history for contemporary debates in political philosophy. His primary research interests include the relationship between ideas of democracy, liberalism, and representative government; toleration and freedom of speech; Enlightenment political philosophy; the thought of John Stuart Mill and its reception; and modern French political theory. He has published widely in political philosophy and the history of political thought.

Sponsored by the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, the Government Department, the History Department, and the College of Social Studies.

Guest Lecturer Felipe Arturo gives talk "The Migration of Plants"

On Thursday, April 6 at 4:30 pm in FISK 201, we welcome Felipe Arturo, who will give the talk:

"The Migration of Plants"

Felipe Arturo presents a selection of artistic works that span a 15-year period of artistic practice based on the migration of plants in recent history and their impact in contemporary cultural practices.

Co-sponsored by Wesleyan's Center for the Arts Creative Campus Initiative, College of the Environment, Fries Center for Global Studies, Latin American Studies, History Department, and Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

Peter Molin - "Word Wars: Literature, Combat, and the Veteran Voice"

Wednesday, April 5 at 4:30 pm in Allbritton 103

Guest Speaker Peter Molin will give the talk "Word Wars: Literature, Combat, and the Veteran Voice".

Peter Molin is a retired US Army infantry officer who currently teaches in the English Department Writing Program at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He has written extensively on the art, film, and literature of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, most prominently on his blog Time Now, as well as in other media and scholarly outlets. 

Mauricio Tenorio Trillo Talk: On the Useful Pointlessness of History

We welcome guest speaker Mauricio Tenorio Trillo who will give the talk:

"On the Useful Pointlessness of History"

Thursday, March 2 at 4:30 pm in Russell House, 350 High Street

Mauricio Tenorio Trillo is the Samuel N. Harper Professor of History at the University of Chicago and associate professor at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico City.

Event is sponsored by the Allbritton Center for Public Life, History Department, and Latin American Studies (LAST).

Panel Discussion on Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming A Space

Zora Neale Hurston: CLAIMING A SPACE: A PANEL DISCUSSION ON FILMMAKING, BIOGRAPHY, AND HISTORY

Wednesday, February 22 at 4:30 p.m. in Daniel Family Commons

Panelists include: Tracey Heather Strain, Randall Maclowry, Daphne Lamothe.

Moderated by Crystal Feimster and Thomas Allen Harris

Co-Chaired by Jennifer Tucker and Rashida Z. Shaw McMahon

Hosted by History Dept with FGSS, CHUM, AFAM, AMST, ANTHRO, CSS, ENG, REL, & SISP

Talk by Glory M. Liu: "Adam Smith's America"

"Adam Smith's America" 

Wednesday, February 22 at 4:30 p.m. in the Woodhead Lounge, Exley 184

Glory M. Liu is a lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard and author of Adam Smith's America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism (Princeton: 2022). A political theorist and intellectual historian, she received her PhD in political science from Stanford University in 2018 and also holds an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge University. Her works have appeared in journals such as Modern Intellectual History and History of European Ideas and she has also written for outlets such as The Nation, The Washington Post, and Aeon Magazine.

A Virtual Conversation with Writer Patrick Radden Keefe

Thursday, February 9, 4:30-5:30 p.m., online only

Co-Sponsored by The College of Letters, Shapiro Writing Center, The History Department, The Science in Society Program, and the Department of American Studies

Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and author of the New York Times bestsellers Empire of Pain and Say Nothing, as well as two earlier nonfiction books: The Snakehead and Chatter. His most recent book is Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels, and Crooks.

History 300 Distinguished Lecture Fall 2022

The Fall 2022 History 300 Lecture features Helge Jordheim.

"Changing the World One Word at a Time: From Flag to Climate Emergency"

Thursday, November 10 at 4:30 p.m. in Tishler Hall

Helge Jordheim is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Oslo, Norway, and a Visiting Professor at Wesleyan. He has published books and articles on 18th-century Germany, concepts of civilization and the world, universal history, the cultural history of time, and topics related to the theory of history, especially the work of Reinhart Koselleck.

Co-Sponsponsored Event: How Queer Were the Greeks? How Queer Are We?

A talk by University of Michigan Professor David Halperin

Thursday, November 3 at 4:30 p.m. at Russell House.

Sponsored by Classical Studies, History, College of Letters, & Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Special Event: A Conversation with Historian and Filmmaker Christian Delage

"Confronting the violence of images and the pain of others: from the experience of war to the projection of images as judicial evidence"

Wednesday, September 21, 2022 at 4:30 p.m. in Boger Hall 112

History Matters Event: BUSTING MYTHS ABOUT CHINA AND CHINESE POWER

Thursday, April 14, 2022, 12:00 - 1:00 pm in Allbritton 311. Lunch will be provided.

For more information click here.

Strong Bodies for the Revolution: Pursuing Health and Power in the People's Republic of China

CEAS Gallery Exhibition

February 16 - May 13, 2022

This exhibit opens Wednesday, February 16 at 12:15 p.m. at the College of East Asian Studies Gallery at Mansfield Freeman Center starting with a reception starting in the gallery, and then moving to the Seminar Room for remarks by Collections Assistant Sam Smith '20, Assistant Professor of History and East Asian Studies, Ying Jia Tan, and special guest Mark Sidel, son of Ruth and Victor Sidel and donor of the propaganda posters.

The exhibit is co-curated by Ying Jia Tan, Rosemary Lennox, Ben Chaffee, Wendi Field Murray, and Christina Lu '22.

Regular gallery hours during the exhibition are Tuesday through Friday, noon - 4:00 p.m.

Save the Date - May 5, 2022 - Talk by Sam Perry

"Benedetta" Film Screening and Discussion

• On Sunday, December 5, 2021 - the film "Benedetta" was shown at Metro Middletown Cinemas (140 Main Street_ at 2:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. 

• On Monday, December 6, 2021, the leading film director, Paul Verhoeven, joined the Wesleyan community  for a discussion of his latest film, "Benedetta" (2021) with Wesleyan Profs. Lisa Dombrowski and Jennifer Tucker. Click here to access the recording of this event.

• On Tuesday, December 7, 2021, Author and historian Judith Brown joined the Wesleyan comminity for a discussion at Russell House, 5:00 - 6:00 p.m.

History 362 Distinguished Lecture Fall 2021

Thursday, November 11 at 4:30 p.m. in Shanklin 107 (Kerr Lecture Hall):

Annual HISTORY 362 Distinguished Lecture featuring Professor Kenda Mutongi, Professor of History at MIT, "MATATU: Oral History and Popular Transportation in Nairobi"

Book Talk by Ying Jia Tan

Friday, November 5, 12:30 - 2:00 p.m.

Ying Jia Tan is giving a virtual book talk at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. Click here to register.

History Department Open House for Prospective History Majors

Meet faculty and students, and learn more about the precarious perch between visions of the past and hopes for the future.

The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free

Book Talk Featuring Writer, Historian, and Wesleyan Alumna: Paulina Bren

Thursday, October 14, 2021 at 4:30 p.m. in Allbritton 311

Sponsored by the History Department, the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program

Writing Empire: Late 19th Century Ottoman Configurations

History Department Open House

The Travelers Lab

Don’t Miss the Opportunity to Participate in Faculty Research in a Collaborative Digital Humanities Lab…

Data Generation, Analysis, and Vizualization in the Historical Analysis of Travel & Communications.

Apply (& learn!) digital techniques of analysis and visualisation to the study of historical travel and communication in a collaborative lab with Gary Shaw (HIST) & Jesse Torgerson (COL).

What is “CLAC”? The Communist Experience in Russian

We at Wesleyan are now entering the third year of offering “Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum” (or CLAC) courses. These are courses taught in languages other than English, all of which provide students and faculty across the campus with opportunities to deepen their engagement with their subjects through the use and further development of their language and intercultural skills. A list of all the CLAC courses we have offered so far, including those being offered this academic year, is on the Fries Center website.

More than Victims: Medicine, Terror, and Healing in the Atlantic Slave Trade

A talk by Carolyn Roberts

The transatlantic slave trade was the largest, forced oceanic migration in human history. This talk explores the little-known role of medicine in the violent trafficking of millions of enslaved Africans and its legacies today.

2020 MEIGS LECTURE: REAGAN, GORBACHEV, AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR

MELVYN P. LEFFLER is Emeritus Professor of American History at The University of Virginia

This lecture on Reagan, Gorbachev, and the end of the Cold War will assess Reagan’s unique role in ending the forty-year conflict with the “Evil Empire.” Leffler’s assessment is a radical reinterpretation of Reagan’s contributions.

THURSDAY, MARCH 26, 2020 | 4:30 P.M., PAC 001

Sponsored by the History Department

White Collar, and Blue Collar Gig Workers: What is the future of American Labor?

Steven Greenhouse '73

Long time New York Journalist and author of Beaten Down, and Worked Up:  the Past, Present, and Future of American Labor.

Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse

Ethan Pollock is Associate Professor of History and Russian Studies at Brown University

For over a thousand years the banya (or Russian bathhouse) has been a crucial institution to a wide variety of people: men and women, rich and poor, straight and gay, religious and atheist. The omnipresence of the banya makes it a lens through which to view many aspects of Russia history—hygiene, intimacy, sociability, the relationship of Russia to the West. The banya is full of contradictions. It can clean bodies and spread disease. It can purify and befoul. It can create community and provide a means of excluding others. Taken together, thousands of sources ranging from archival documents and municipal regulations to idioms, films, art, cartoons, memoirs, diaries, songs, novels, poems, and plays provide the basis for this unprecedented portrait of the institution of the banya and for a whole new way of seeing the history of Russia.

The Theory and Practice of History

The 2019-20 seminar series will meet four times across the year, usually on Thursdays, and will feature an exciting international and interdisciplinary line up of scholars.

For further information or a copy of the papers once they become available, contact Gary Shaw at gshaw@wesleyan.edu. Here are the dates and current topics. Seminars will be in Boger Hall.

Starting time for all sessions is 4:30.

• November 14: Stefka Eriksen, Norwegian Institute of Cultural Heritage, “The Archaeology and Allegory of the Settlement of Iceland: Reflections on the Theory and Method of Interdisciplinary Environmental History.”  Boger Hall 115
• February 6:  Heather Keenleyside, University of Chicago: “The Literary History of the History of Ideas,”  Boger Hall 113
• March 5: Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, University of Oulu, “How to Get it Wrong: Historiography, Normativity and the Holocaust Debate,”  Boger Hall 113
•  

A Walk into Winter: The 1795 Dutch Embassy to Qing China

Tonio Andrade is professor of history at Emory University. His core geographical area of expertise is China, but his research focuses on interconnections in the Early Modern Period (1500-1800) and on comparative history. He is author of The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History; Lost Colony: The Untold Story of Europe's First War with China and How Taiwan became Chinese. Honors include the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and Gutenberg e-Prize.

The Ethical Choices of Whales: Bowheads, Hunters, and Mutual Adaptations in the Bering Strait, 1848-1968

Bathsheba Demuth, Assistant Professor of History at Brown University

Bowhead whales have been known by three distinct groups of hunters along the Bering Strait over the past two centuries: indigenous Yupik and Inupiaq whalers, capitalist commercial whalers, and communist industrial whalers. This talk looks at how whales became known through the labor of their killing, examining the cosmologies each of these three kinds of whaling practitioners composed around the animals they hunted. How where whales, particularly bowheads, imagined and treated, and how did this change across economic systems?  What kind of emotional relationships were possible? And what kinds of relationships were considered ethical between humans and whales? Did whales make ethical judgments of their hunters? What does including whale behavior in our analysis of human-whale interactions provoke in our historical understanding, and how should we situate non-human actions in human narratives of the past?

Spring 2024 -Special Event, Tuesday, April 2, 2024

"Dina Pronicheva, Actress and Holocaust Surviver - Rethinking Ukrainian Studies and the Embodied Experience of War" 

Tuesday, April 2, 2024 @ 4:30PM in PAC101

Dina Pronicheva is well-known as one of the few survivors of Babyn Iar, when the Nazis murdered over 30,000 Jews in two days in 1941. Her testimony has served scholars and courts for describing Nazi atrocities. Rarely discussed, however, is her work in theater. After Babyn Iar, it was her skills as an actress that helped her survive for over two years until liberation, passing as a non-Jew working in Ukrainian theatre. This lecture shows the importance of the Jewish experience that forms an inextricable part of the Ukrainian history, and the importance of Ukraine as a place in Jewish culture. Finally, Dina Pronicheva’s story suggests the embodied nature of theater and survival and offers much to consider in our understanding of life in wartime Ukraine today.

Dr. Mayhill C. Fowler is an associate professor in the Department of History at Stetson University. She has published widely on culture in Ukraine, including her book Beau Monde on Empire's Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine (Toronto, 2017). She is currently finishing a book on women in theater in Ukraine across the long 20^th century and re-thinking a project on Soviet military theater. She has held fellowships at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, the University of Toronto, and she was a Fulbright scholar to Ukraine 2019-2020. She is an affiliated researcher with the Center for Urban History in Lviv and affiliated faculty in the Program in Theater Studies at Ivan Franko National University. She is also a former actress.

Spring 2024 -Special Event, Wednesday, March 27, 2024

"The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects." 

Wednesday, March 27, 2024 @ 4:30PM in Allbritton 311

We welcome guest lecturer Brandon Schechter, who will be talking about the Red Army through objects. The Red Army was the largest force assembled in human history, defeating fascism in the course of the most destructive war humanity has known. Millions of diverse people – men and women, peasants and workers, Muslims and atheists – came together to defeat an enemy who wanted to enslave or annihilate them. A common set of objects was often all that separated these soldiers from civilians and the only thing uniting very different people in the ranks. This talk will look at how ordinary things can tell the story of an epic event and attempt to humanize the people who defeated fascism through looking at their everyday lives. In this talk Dr. Schechter discusses his award-winning book The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (Cornell University Press, 2019) which won the American Historical Association’s Paul Birdsall Prize in 2020. 

Brandon Schechter is the author of The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (2019). He’s a consultant at the Blavatnik Archive and has taught at Columbia, NYU, NYU Shanghai, Brown, and UC Berkley, where he recieved his Ph.D. Schechter received his B.A. in Russian Studies at Vassar College.

Spring 2024 -Special Event, Friday, February 23, 2024

"The Missionary Zeal: Liberal Arts Education and the Transformation of US-China Relations" 

Friday, February 23, 2024 

On Friday, February 23, 2024, scholars from nine liberal arts colleges across the nation will convene at Wesleyan University to explore how liberal arts education reshaped US-China relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by exploring the rich repositories of historical materials from their respective institutions. 

Spring 2024 -Special Event, Thursday, February 15, 2024

"Chivalry and Alterity at the Rennaissance Tournament" 

Thursday, February 15, 2024 @ 4:30PM in PAC 101

In sixteenth-century Europe, princes and nobles donned costumes and masks to impersonate warriors and kings from foreign lands. During this age of overseas expansion, equestrian tournaments became an activity for imagining and experiencing human difference, both cultural and embodied. If early masked tournaments focused especially on the rivalry between Christians and Muslims, later ones also represented participants from the Americas, Africa, and South Asia, seeking eventually to evoke the entire world. At this moment of intensified global interaction, the tournament—a festivity of medieval origin at which the old military elite celebrated its martial values—proved a remarkably flexible medium for interpreting the newly expanded world. It also, perhaps inevitably, served to assert European superiority. By expressing their understanding of human difference through equestrian exercises and masquerades, princes and nobles not only asserted their claim to rule but also shaped early European ideas about the world's people.

Alexander Bevilacqua is Associate Professor of History at Williams College. He studies the cultural and intellectual consequences of European expansion in the first global era, ca. 1500-1800. His book The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Harvard, 2018) won the Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. His scholarship has appeared in journals including Past and Present, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, and Journal of Modern History.

CANCELLED Fall 2023-Special Event, Tuesday, December 5

"The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects." 

Tuesday, December 5, 2023 @ 4:30PM in Allbritton 311

We welcome guest lecturer Brandon Schechter, who will be talking about the Red Army through objects. The Red Army was the largest force assembled in human history, defeating fascism in the course of the most destructive war humanity has known. Millions of diverse people – men and women, peasants and workers, Muslims and atheists – came together to defeat an enemy who wanted to enslave or annihilate them. A common set of objects was often all that separated these soldiers from civilians and the only thing uniting very different people in the ranks. This talk will look at how ordinary things can tell the story of an epic event and attempt to humanize the people who defeated fascism through looking at their everyday lives. In this talk Dr. Schechter discusses his award-winning book The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (Cornell University Press, 2019) which won the American Historical Association’s Paul Birdsall Prize in 2020. 

Brandon Schechter is the author of The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (2019). He’s a consultant at the Blavatnik Archive and has taught at Columbia, NYU, NYU Shanghai, Brown, and UC Berkley, where he recieved his Ph.D. Schechter received his B.A. in Russian Studies at Vassar College.

Fall 2023-Special Event, Tuesday, November 7

"The Liberatory Power of Guilt: How a Sikh Holy Town Shaped Utopian Dreams of Pakistan"

Tuesday, November 7th at 4:30 pm Judd 116

We welcome guest lecturer, Priya Satia. In this talk, Prof. Satia will explain how, in the era of British colonialism, environmental transformation of a Sikh holy site in a semi-arid region of Punjab became crucial to securing legitimacy in local political contests. The emerging town's particular spiritual culture went on to water various struggles for autonomy--including a vision of Pakistan as a state-sized "dera" (socio-religious residence of a spiritual leader) offering refuge and relief from colonial and casteist orders.

Priya Satia is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History and Professor of History at Stanford University. She is the author of three award-winning books: Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (OUP, 2008); Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Duckworth, 2018); Time's Monster: History, Conscience and Britain's Empire (Penguin, 2020). Her work can also be found in the American Historical Review, Past & Present, Technology & Culture, Humanity, and other scholarly journals and edited volumes. Prof. Satia writes frequently for popular media, such as the Washington Post, Time Magazine, The New Republic, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and other outlets.

Sponsored by the History Department, Fall 2023

Fall 2023-Special Event, Tuesday, October 3

"You Can Never Rest, Because They Keep Coming": On America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created

Tuesday, October 3 at 4:30 pm Boger 114

We welcome guest lecturer, Nick Tabor. Nick Tabor is the author of Africatown:  America's Last Slave Ship and the Community it Created.

Nick Tabor is the author of Africatown: America’s Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created, a blend of history and investigative journalism that traces the development of a neighborhood established by survivors of the last slave voyage to the US. He was a historical consultant on the documentary Descendant, which was presented on Netflix by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company in 2022. He previously worked at daily newspapers and on the editorial staff of New York Magazine. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.

Sponored by Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, The African American Studies Department, The History Department and the CSS 

Fall 2023-Special Lecture, Tuesday, September 26

"A Madman in the White House?  On Sigmund Freud's Unknown Diagnosis of Woodrow Wilson" 

Tuesday, September 26 at 4:30 pm Allbritton 311 

Join us for a talk by a well-known French Historian, Patrick Weil

Patrick Weil is a Florence Rogatz Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School, and a senior research fellow at the French National Research Center in the University of Paris1, Pantheon-Sorbonne. Professor Weil's work focuses on comparative immigration, citizenship, and church-state law and policy. His most recent books are The Madman in the White House. Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (Harvard University Press, 2023) and De La Laïcité en France (Grasset, 2021).

Patrick Weil is also, since 2006, the founder and the chairman of the NGO Libraries Without Borders (Bibliothèques Sans Frontières).

Sponsored by History Department, CSS and the Romance Languages and Literatures Department 

2023 MEIGS LECTURE - Tuesday, April 11 at 4:30 pm

Elizabeth Hinton, Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at Yale University, will deliver the annual Meigs Lecture in US History.

Tuesday, April 11 at 4:30 pm in Boger 114.

Elizabeth Hinton is a historian of American inequality who is considered one of the nation’s leading experts on policing and mass incarceration. Hinton’s past and current scholarship provides a deeper grasp of the persistence of poverty, urban violence, and racial inequality in the United States. She is a Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at Yale University.

Sponsored by the History Department, the Albritton Center for Public Life, the Department of African American Studies, the Center for African American Studies, and the American Studies Department.

Guest Lecturer Gregory Conti gives talk "How to think about Mill's On Liberty"

On Monday, April 10 at 4:30 pm in Boger 114, guest speaker Gregory Conti will give the talk:

"How to think about Mill's On Liberty"

Gregory Conti is assistant professor of politics at Princeton. His research focuses on the history of modern political thought, especially in Britain and France, and on the lessons that can be drawn from that history for contemporary debates in political philosophy. His primary research interests include the relationship between ideas of democracy, liberalism, and representative government; toleration and freedom of speech; Enlightenment political philosophy; the thought of John Stuart Mill and its reception; and modern French political theory. He has published widely in political philosophy and the history of political thought.

Sponsored by the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, the Government Department, the History Department, and the College of Social Studies.

Guest Lecturer Felipe Arturo gives talk "The Migration of Plants"

On Thursday, April 6 at 4:30 pm in FISK 201, we welcome Felipe Arturo, who will give the talk:

"The Migration of Plants"

Felipe Arturo presents a selection of artistic works that span a 15-year period of artistic practice based on the migration of plants in recent history and their impact in contemporary cultural practices.

Co-sponsored by Wesleyan's Center for the Arts Creative Campus Initiative, College of the Environment, Fries Center for Global Studies, Latin American Studies, History Department, and Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

Peter Molin - "Word Wars: Literature, Combat, and the Veteran Voice"

Wednesday, April 5 at 4:30 pm in Allbritton 103

Guest Speaker Peter Molin will give the talk "Word Wars: Literature, Combat, and the Veteran Voice".

Peter Molin is a retired US Army infantry officer who currently teaches in the English Department Writing Program at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He has written extensively on the art, film, and literature of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, most prominently on his blog Time Now, as well as in other media and scholarly outlets. 

Mauricio Tenorio Trillo Talk: On the Useful Pointlessness of History

We welcome guest speaker Mauricio Tenorio Trillo who will give the talk:

"On the Useful Pointlessness of History"

Thursday, March 2 at 4:30 pm in Russell House, 350 High Street

Mauricio Tenorio Trillo is the Samuel N. Harper Professor of History at the University of Chicago and associate professor at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico City.

Event is sponsored by the Allbritton Center for Public Life, History Department, and Latin American Studies (LAST).

Panel Discussion on Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming A Space

Zora Neale Hurston: CLAIMING A SPACE: A PANEL DISCUSSION ON FILMMAKING, BIOGRAPHY, AND HISTORY

Wednesday, February 22 at 4:30 p.m. in Daniel Family Commons

Panelists include: Tracey Heather Strain, Randall Maclowry, Daphne Lamothe.

Moderated by Crystal Feimster and Thomas Allen Harris

Co-Chaired by Jennifer Tucker and Rashida Z. Shaw McMahon

Hosted by History Dept with FGSS, CHUM, AFAM, AMST, ANTHRO, CSS, ENG, REL, & SISP

Talk by Glory M. Liu: "Adam Smith's America"

"Adam Smith's America" 

Wednesday, February 22 at 4:30 p.m. in the Woodhead Lounge, Exley 184

Glory M. Liu is a lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard and author of Adam Smith's America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism (Princeton: 2022). A political theorist and intellectual historian, she received her PhD in political science from Stanford University in 2018 and also holds an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge University. Her works have appeared in journals such as Modern Intellectual History and History of European Ideas and she has also written for outlets such as The Nation, The Washington Post, and Aeon Magazine.

A Virtual Conversation with Writer Patrick Radden Keefe

Thursday, February 9, 4:30-5:30 p.m., online only

Co-Sponsored by The College of Letters, Shapiro Writing Center, The History Department, The Science in Society Program, and the Department of American Studies

Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and author of the New York Times bestsellers Empire of Pain and Say Nothing, as well as two earlier nonfiction books: The Snakehead and Chatter. His most recent book is Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels, and Crooks.

History 300 Distinguished Lecture Fall 2022

The Fall 2022 History 300 Lecture features Helge Jordheim.

"Changing the World One Word at a Time: From Flag to Climate Emergency"

Thursday, November 10 at 4:30 p.m. in Tishler Hall

Helge Jordheim is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Oslo, Norway, and a Visiting Professor at Wesleyan. He has published books and articles on 18th-century Germany, concepts of civilization and the world, universal history, the cultural history of time, and topics related to the theory of history, especially the work of Reinhart Koselleck.

Co-Sponsponsored Event: How Queer Were the Greeks? How Queer Are We?

A talk by University of Michigan Professor David Halperin

Thursday, November 3 at 4:30 p.m. at Russell House.

Sponsored by Classical Studies, History, College of Letters, & Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Special Event: A Conversation with Historian and Filmmaker Christian Delage

"Confronting the violence of images and the pain of others: from the experience of war to the projection of images as judicial evidence"

Wednesday, September 21, 2022 at 4:30 p.m. in Boger Hall 112

History Matters Event: BUSTING MYTHS ABOUT CHINA AND CHINESE POWER

Thursday, April 14, 2022, 12:00 - 1:00 pm in Allbritton 311. Lunch will be provided.

For more information click here.

Strong Bodies for the Revolution: Pursuing Health and Power in the People's Republic of China

CEAS Gallery Exhibition

February 16 - May 13, 2022

This exhibit opens Wednesday, February 16 at 12:15 p.m. at the College of East Asian Studies Gallery at Mansfield Freeman Center starting with a reception starting in the gallery, and then moving to the Seminar Room for remarks by Collections Assistant Sam Smith '20, Assistant Professor of History and East Asian Studies, Ying Jia Tan, and special guest Mark Sidel, son of Ruth and Victor Sidel and donor of the propaganda posters.

The exhibit is co-curated by Ying Jia Tan, Rosemary Lennox, Ben Chaffee, Wendi Field Murray, and Christina Lu '22.

Regular gallery hours during the exhibition are Tuesday through Friday, noon - 4:00 p.m.

Save the Date - May 5, 2022 - Talk by Sam Perry

"Benedetta" Film Screening and Discussion

• On Sunday, December 5, 2021 - the film "Benedetta" was shown at Metro Middletown Cinemas (140 Main Street_ at 2:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. 

• On Monday, December 6, 2021, the leading film director, Paul Verhoeven, joined the Wesleyan community  for a discussion of his latest film, "Benedetta" (2021) with Wesleyan Profs. Lisa Dombrowski and Jennifer Tucker. Click here to access the recording of this event.

• On Tuesday, December 7, 2021, Author and historian Judith Brown joined the Wesleyan comminity for a discussion at Russell House, 5:00 - 6:00 p.m.

History 362 Distinguished Lecture Fall 2021

Thursday, November 11 at 4:30 p.m. in Shanklin 107 (Kerr Lecture Hall):

Annual HISTORY 362 Distinguished Lecture featuring Professor Kenda Mutongi, Professor of History at MIT, "MATATU: Oral History and Popular Transportation in Nairobi"

Book Talk by Ying Jia Tan

Friday, November 5, 12:30 - 2:00 p.m.

Ying Jia Tan is giving a virtual book talk at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. Click here to register.

History Department Open House for Prospective History Majors

Meet faculty and students, and learn more about the precarious perch between visions of the past and hopes for the future.

The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free

Book Talk Featuring Writer, Historian, and Wesleyan Alumna: Paulina Bren

Thursday, October 14, 2021 at 4:30 p.m. in Allbritton 311

Sponsored by the History Department, the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program

Writing Empire: Late 19th Century Ottoman Configurations

History Department Open House

The Travelers Lab

Don’t Miss the Opportunity to Participate in Faculty Research in a Collaborative Digital Humanities Lab…

Data Generation, Analysis, and Vizualization in the Historical Analysis of Travel & Communications.

Apply (& learn!) digital techniques of analysis and visualisation to the study of historical travel and communication in a collaborative lab with Gary Shaw (HIST) & Jesse Torgerson (COL).

What is “CLAC”? The Communist Experience in Russian

We at Wesleyan are now entering the third year of offering “Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum” (or CLAC) courses. These are courses taught in languages other than English, all of which provide students and faculty across the campus with opportunities to deepen their engagement with their subjects through the use and further development of their language and intercultural skills. A list of all the CLAC courses we have offered so far, including those being offered this academic year, is on the Fries Center website.

More than Victims: Medicine, Terror, and Healing in the Atlantic Slave Trade

A talk by Carolyn Roberts

The transatlantic slave trade was the largest, forced oceanic migration in human history. This talk explores the little-known role of medicine in the violent trafficking of millions of enslaved Africans and its legacies today.

2020 MEIGS LECTURE: REAGAN, GORBACHEV, AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR

MELVYN P. LEFFLER is Emeritus Professor of American History at The University of Virginia

This lecture on Reagan, Gorbachev, and the end of the Cold War will assess Reagan’s unique role in ending the forty-year conflict with the “Evil Empire.” Leffler’s assessment is a radical reinterpretation of Reagan’s contributions.

THURSDAY, MARCH 26, 2020 | 4:30 P.M., PAC 001

Sponsored by the History Department

White Collar, and Blue Collar Gig Workers: What is the future of American Labor?

Steven Greenhouse '73

Long time New York Journalist and author of Beaten Down, and Worked Up:  the Past, Present, and Future of American Labor.

Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse

Ethan Pollock is Associate Professor of History and Russian Studies at Brown University

For over a thousand years the banya (or Russian bathhouse) has been a crucial institution to a wide variety of people: men and women, rich and poor, straight and gay, religious and atheist. The omnipresence of the banya makes it a lens through which to view many aspects of Russia history—hygiene, intimacy, sociability, the relationship of Russia to the West. The banya is full of contradictions. It can clean bodies and spread disease. It can purify and befoul. It can create community and provide a means of excluding others. Taken together, thousands of sources ranging from archival documents and municipal regulations to idioms, films, art, cartoons, memoirs, diaries, songs, novels, poems, and plays provide the basis for this unprecedented portrait of the institution of the banya and for a whole new way of seeing the history of Russia.

The Theory and Practice of History

The 2019-20 seminar series will meet four times across the year, usually on Thursdays, and will feature an exciting international and interdisciplinary line up of scholars.

For further information or a copy of the papers once they become available, contact Gary Shaw at gshaw@wesleyan.edu. Here are the dates and current topics. Seminars will be in Boger Hall.

Starting time for all sessions is 4:30.

• November 14: Stefka Eriksen, Norwegian Institute of Cultural Heritage, “The Archaeology and Allegory of the Settlement of Iceland: Reflections on the Theory and Method of Interdisciplinary Environmental History.”  Boger Hall 115
• February 6:  Heather Keenleyside, University of Chicago: “The Literary History of the History of Ideas,”  Boger Hall 113
• March 5: Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, University of Oulu, “How to Get it Wrong: Historiography, Normativity and the Holocaust Debate,”  Boger Hall 113
•  

A Walk into Winter: The 1795 Dutch Embassy to Qing China

Tonio Andrade is professor of history at Emory University. His core geographical area of expertise is China, but his research focuses on interconnections in the Early Modern Period (1500-1800) and on comparative history. He is author of The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History; Lost Colony: The Untold Story of Europe's First War with China and How Taiwan became Chinese. Honors include the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and Gutenberg e-Prize.

The Ethical Choices of Whales: Bowheads, Hunters, and Mutual Adaptations in the Bering Strait, 1848-1968

Bathsheba Demuth, Assistant Professor of History at Brown University

Bowhead whales have been known by three distinct groups of hunters along the Bering Strait over the past two centuries: indigenous Yupik and Inupiaq whalers, capitalist commercial whalers, and communist industrial whalers. This talk looks at how whales became known through the labor of their killing, examining the cosmologies each of these three kinds of whaling practitioners composed around the animals they hunted. How where whales, particularly bowheads, imagined and treated, and how did this change across economic systems?  What kind of emotional relationships were possible? And what kinds of relationships were considered ethical between humans and whales? Did whales make ethical judgments of their hunters? What does including whale behavior in our analysis of human-whale interactions provoke in our historical understanding, and how should we situate non-human actions in human narratives of the past?

Spring 2024 -Special Event,

"The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects." 

Wednesday, March 27, 2024 @ 4:30PM in Allbritton 311

We welcome guest lecturer Brandon Schechter, who will be talking about the Red Army through objects. The Red Army was the largest force assembled in human history, defeating fascism in the course of the most destructive war humanity has known. Millions of diverse people – men and women, peasants and workers, Muslims and atheists – came together to defeat an enemy who wanted to enslave or annihilate them. A common set of objects was often all that separated these soldiers from civilians and the only thing uniting very different people in the ranks. This talk will look at how ordinary things can tell the story of an epic event and attempt to humanize the people who defeated fascism through looking at their everyday lives. In this talk Dr. Schechter discusses his award-winning book The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (Cornell University Press, 2019) which won the American Historical Association’s Paul Birdsall Prize in 2020. 

Brandon Schechter is the author of The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (2019). He’s a consultant at the Blavatnik Archive and has taught at Columbia, NYU, NYU Shanghai, Brown, and UC Berkley, where he recieved his Ph.D. Schechter received his B.A. in Russian Studies at Vassar College.

Spring 2024 -Special Event, Thursday, February 15, 2024

"Chivalry and Alterity at the Rennaissance Tournament" 

Thursday, February 15, 2024 @ 4:30PM in PAC 101

In sixteenth-century Europe, princes and nobles donned costumes and masks to impersonate warriors and kings from foreign lands. During this age of overseas expansion, equestrian tournaments became an activity for imagining and experiencing human difference, both cultural and embodied. If early masked tournaments focused especially on the rivalry between Christians and Muslims, later ones also represented participants from the Americas, Africa, and South Asia, seeking eventually to evoke the entire world. At this moment of intensified global interaction, the tournament—a festivity of medieval origin at which the old military elite celebrated its martial values—proved a remarkably flexible medium for interpreting the newly expanded world. It also, perhaps inevitably, served to assert European superiority. By expressing their understanding of human difference through equestrian exercises and masquerades, princes and nobles not only asserted their claim to rule but also shaped early European ideas about the world's people.

Alexander Bevilacqua is Associate Professor of History at Williams College. He studies the cultural and intellectual consequences of European expansion in the first global era, ca. 1500-1800. His book The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Harvard, 2018) won the Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. His scholarship has appeared in journals including Past and Present, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, and Journal of Modern History.

CANCELLED Fall 2023-Special Event, Tuesday, December 5

"The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects." 

Tuesday, December 5, 2023 @ 4:30PM in Allbritton 311

We welcome guest lecturer Brandon Schechter, who will be talking about the Red Army through objects. The Red Army was the largest force assembled in human history, defeating fascism in the course of the most destructive war humanity has known. Millions of diverse people – men and women, peasants and workers, Muslims and atheists – came together to defeat an enemy who wanted to enslave or annihilate them. A common set of objects was often all that separated these soldiers from civilians and the only thing uniting very different people in the ranks. This talk will look at how ordinary things can tell the story of an epic event and attempt to humanize the people who defeated fascism through looking at their everyday lives. In this talk Dr. Schechter discusses his award-winning book The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (Cornell University Press, 2019) which won the American Historical Association’s Paul Birdsall Prize in 2020. 

Brandon Schechter is the author of The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (2019). He’s a consultant at the Blavatnik Archive and has taught at Columbia, NYU, NYU Shanghai, Brown, and UC Berkley, where he recieved his Ph.D. Schechter received his B.A. in Russian Studies at Vassar College.

Fall 2023-Special Event, Tuesday, November 7

"The Liberatory Power of Guilt: How a Sikh Holy Town Shaped Utopian Dreams of Pakistan"

Tuesday, November 7th at 4:30 pm Judd 116

We welcome guest lecturer, Priya Satia. In this talk, Prof. Satia will explain how, in the era of British colonialism, environmental transformation of a Sikh holy site in a semi-arid region of Punjab became crucial to securing legitimacy in local political contests. The emerging town's particular spiritual culture went on to water various struggles for autonomy--including a vision of Pakistan as a state-sized "dera" (socio-religious residence of a spiritual leader) offering refuge and relief from colonial and casteist orders.

Priya Satia is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History and Professor of History at Stanford University. She is the author of three award-winning books: Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (OUP, 2008); Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Duckworth, 2018); Time's Monster: History, Conscience and Britain's Empire (Penguin, 2020). Her work can also be found in the American Historical Review, Past & Present, Technology & Culture, Humanity, and other scholarly journals and edited volumes. Prof. Satia writes frequently for popular media, such as the Washington Post, Time Magazine, The New Republic, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and other outlets.

Sponsored by the History Department, Fall 2023

Fall 2023-Special Event, Tuesday, October 3

"You Can Never Rest, Because They Keep Coming": On America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created

Tuesday, October 3 at 4:30 pm Boger 114

We welcome guest lecturer, Nick Tabor. Nick Tabor is the author of Africatown:  America's Last Slave Ship and the Community it Created.

Nick Tabor is the author of Africatown: America’s Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created, a blend of history and investigative journalism that traces the development of a neighborhood established by survivors of the last slave voyage to the US. He was a historical consultant on the documentary Descendant, which was presented on Netflix by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company in 2022. He previously worked at daily newspapers and on the editorial staff of New York Magazine. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.

Sponored by Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, The African American Studies Department, The History Department and the CSS 

Fall 2023-Special Lecture, Tuesday, September 26

"A Madman in the White House?  On Sigmund Freud's Unknown Diagnosis of Woodrow Wilson" 

Tuesday, September 26 at 4:30 pm Allbritton 311 

Join us for a talk by a well-known French Historian, Patrick Weil

Patrick Weil is a Florence Rogatz Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School, and a senior research fellow at the French National Research Center in the University of Paris1, Pantheon-Sorbonne. Professor Weil's work focuses on comparative immigration, citizenship, and church-state law and policy. His most recent books are The Madman in the White House. Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (Harvard University Press, 2023) and De La Laïcité en France (Grasset, 2021).

Patrick Weil is also, since 2006, the founder and the chairman of the NGO Libraries Without Borders (Bibliothèques Sans Frontières).

Sponsored by History Department, CSS and the Romance Languages and Literatures Department 

2023 MEIGS LECTURE - Tuesday, April 11 at 4:30 pm

Elizabeth Hinton, Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at Yale University, will deliver the annual Meigs Lecture in US History.

Tuesday, April 11 at 4:30 pm in Boger 114.

Elizabeth Hinton is a historian of American inequality who is considered one of the nation’s leading experts on policing and mass incarceration. Hinton’s past and current scholarship provides a deeper grasp of the persistence of poverty, urban violence, and racial inequality in the United States. She is a Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at Yale University.

Sponsored by the History Department, the Albritton Center for Public Life, the Department of African American Studies, the Center for African American Studies, and the American Studies Department.

Guest Lecturer Gregory Conti gives talk "How to think about Mill's On Liberty"

On Monday, April 10 at 4:30 pm in Boger 114, guest speaker Gregory Conti will give the talk:

"How to think about Mill's On Liberty"

Gregory Conti is assistant professor of politics at Princeton. His research focuses on the history of modern political thought, especially in Britain and France, and on the lessons that can be drawn from that history for contemporary debates in political philosophy. His primary research interests include the relationship between ideas of democracy, liberalism, and representative government; toleration and freedom of speech; Enlightenment political philosophy; the thought of John Stuart Mill and its reception; and modern French political theory. He has published widely in political philosophy and the history of political thought.

Sponsored by the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, the Government Department, the History Department, and the College of Social Studies.

Guest Lecturer Felipe Arturo gives talk "The Migration of Plants"

On Thursday, April 6 at 4:30 pm in FISK 201, we welcome Felipe Arturo, who will give the talk:

"The Migration of Plants"

Felipe Arturo presents a selection of artistic works that span a 15-year period of artistic practice based on the migration of plants in recent history and their impact in contemporary cultural practices.

Co-sponsored by Wesleyan's Center for the Arts Creative Campus Initiative, College of the Environment, Fries Center for Global Studies, Latin American Studies, History Department, and Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

Peter Molin - "Word Wars: Literature, Combat, and the Veteran Voice"

Wednesday, April 5 at 4:30 pm in Allbritton 103

Guest Speaker Peter Molin will give the talk "Word Wars: Literature, Combat, and the Veteran Voice".

Peter Molin is a retired US Army infantry officer who currently teaches in the English Department Writing Program at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He has written extensively on the art, film, and literature of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, most prominently on his blog Time Now, as well as in other media and scholarly outlets. 

Mauricio Tenorio Trillo Talk: On the Useful Pointlessness of History

We welcome guest speaker Mauricio Tenorio Trillo who will give the talk:

"On the Useful Pointlessness of History"

Thursday, March 2 at 4:30 pm in Russell House, 350 High Street

Mauricio Tenorio Trillo is the Samuel N. Harper Professor of History at the University of Chicago and associate professor at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico City.

Event is sponsored by the Allbritton Center for Public Life, History Department, and Latin American Studies (LAST).

Panel Discussion on Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming A Space

Zora Neale Hurston: CLAIMING A SPACE: A PANEL DISCUSSION ON FILMMAKING, BIOGRAPHY, AND HISTORY

Wednesday, February 22 at 4:30 p.m. in Daniel Family Commons

Panelists include: Tracey Heather Strain, Randall Maclowry, Daphne Lamothe.

Moderated by Crystal Feimster and Thomas Allen Harris

Co-Chaired by Jennifer Tucker and Rashida Z. Shaw McMahon

Hosted by History Dept with FGSS, CHUM, AFAM, AMST, ANTHRO, CSS, ENG, REL, & SISP

Talk by Glory M. Liu: "Adam Smith's America"

"Adam Smith's America" 

Wednesday, February 22 at 4:30 p.m. in the Woodhead Lounge, Exley 184

Glory M. Liu is a lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard and author of Adam Smith's America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism (Princeton: 2022). A political theorist and intellectual historian, she received her PhD in political science from Stanford University in 2018 and also holds an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge University. Her works have appeared in journals such as Modern Intellectual History and History of European Ideas and she has also written for outlets such as The Nation, The Washington Post, and Aeon Magazine.

A Virtual Conversation with Writer Patrick Radden Keefe

Thursday, February 9, 4:30-5:30 p.m., online only

Co-Sponsored by The College of Letters, Shapiro Writing Center, The History Department, The Science in Society Program, and the Department of American Studies

Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and author of the New York Times bestsellers Empire of Pain and Say Nothing, as well as two earlier nonfiction books: The Snakehead and Chatter. His most recent book is Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels, and Crooks.

History 300 Distinguished Lecture Fall 2022

The Fall 2022 History 300 Lecture features Helge Jordheim.

"Changing the World One Word at a Time: From Flag to Climate Emergency"

Thursday, November 10 at 4:30 p.m. in Tishler Hall

Helge Jordheim is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Oslo, Norway, and a Visiting Professor at Wesleyan. He has published books and articles on 18th-century Germany, concepts of civilization and the world, universal history, the cultural history of time, and topics related to the theory of history, especially the work of Reinhart Koselleck.

Co-Sponsponsored Event: How Queer Were the Greeks? How Queer Are We?

A talk by University of Michigan Professor David Halperin

Thursday, November 3 at 4:30 p.m. at Russell House.

Sponsored by Classical Studies, History, College of Letters, & Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Special Event: A Conversation with Historian and Filmmaker Christian Delage

"Confronting the violence of images and the pain of others: from the experience of war to the projection of images as judicial evidence"

Wednesday, September 21, 2022 at 4:30 p.m. in Boger Hall 112

History Matters Event: BUSTING MYTHS ABOUT CHINA AND CHINESE POWER

Thursday, April 14, 2022, 12:00 - 1:00 pm in Allbritton 311. Lunch will be provided.

For more information click here.

Strong Bodies for the Revolution: Pursuing Health and Power in the People's Republic of China

CEAS Gallery Exhibition

February 16 - May 13, 2022

This exhibit opens Wednesday, February 16 at 12:15 p.m. at the College of East Asian Studies Gallery at Mansfield Freeman Center starting with a reception starting in the gallery, and then moving to the Seminar Room for remarks by Collections Assistant Sam Smith '20, Assistant Professor of History and East Asian Studies, Ying Jia Tan, and special guest Mark Sidel, son of Ruth and Victor Sidel and donor of the propaganda posters.

The exhibit is co-curated by Ying Jia Tan, Rosemary Lennox, Ben Chaffee, Wendi Field Murray, and Christina Lu '22.

Regular gallery hours during the exhibition are Tuesday through Friday, noon - 4:00 p.m.

Save the Date - May 5, 2022 - Talk by Sam Perry

"Benedetta" Film Screening and Discussion

• On Sunday, December 5, 2021 - the film "Benedetta" was shown at Metro Middletown Cinemas (140 Main Street_ at 2:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. 

• On Monday, December 6, 2021, the leading film director, Paul Verhoeven, joined the Wesleyan community  for a discussion of his latest film, "Benedetta" (2021) with Wesleyan Profs. Lisa Dombrowski and Jennifer Tucker. Click here to access the recording of this event.

• On Tuesday, December 7, 2021, Author and historian Judith Brown joined the Wesleyan comminity for a discussion at Russell House, 5:00 - 6:00 p.m.

History 362 Distinguished Lecture Fall 2021

Thursday, November 11 at 4:30 p.m. in Shanklin 107 (Kerr Lecture Hall):

Annual HISTORY 362 Distinguished Lecture featuring Professor Kenda Mutongi, Professor of History at MIT, "MATATU: Oral History and Popular Transportation in Nairobi"

Book Talk by Ying Jia Tan

Friday, November 5, 12:30 - 2:00 p.m.

Ying Jia Tan is giving a virtual book talk at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. Click here to register.

History Department Open House for Prospective History Majors

Meet faculty and students, and learn more about the precarious perch between visions of the past and hopes for the future.

The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free

Book Talk Featuring Writer, Historian, and Wesleyan Alumna: Paulina Bren

Thursday, October 14, 2021 at 4:30 p.m. in Allbritton 311

Sponsored by the History Department, the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program

Writing Empire: Late 19th Century Ottoman Configurations

History Department Open House

The Travelers Lab

Don’t Miss the Opportunity to Participate in Faculty Research in a Collaborative Digital Humanities Lab…

Data Generation, Analysis, and Vizualization in the Historical Analysis of Travel & Communications.

Apply (& learn!) digital techniques of analysis and visualisation to the study of historical travel and communication in a collaborative lab with Gary Shaw (HIST) & Jesse Torgerson (COL).

What is “CLAC”? The Communist Experience in Russian

We at Wesleyan are now entering the third year of offering “Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum” (or CLAC) courses. These are courses taught in languages other than English, all of which provide students and faculty across the campus with opportunities to deepen their engagement with their subjects through the use and further development of their language and intercultural skills. A list of all the CLAC courses we have offered so far, including those being offered this academic year, is on the Fries Center website.

More than Victims: Medicine, Terror, and Healing in the Atlantic Slave Trade

A talk by Carolyn Roberts

The transatlantic slave trade was the largest, forced oceanic migration in human history. This talk explores the little-known role of medicine in the violent trafficking of millions of enslaved Africans and its legacies today.

2020 MEIGS LECTURE: REAGAN, GORBACHEV, AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR

MELVYN P. LEFFLER is Emeritus Professor of American History at The University of Virginia

This lecture on Reagan, Gorbachev, and the end of the Cold War will assess Reagan’s unique role in ending the forty-year conflict with the “Evil Empire.” Leffler’s assessment is a radical reinterpretation of Reagan’s contributions.

THURSDAY, MARCH 26, 2020 | 4:30 P.M., PAC 001

Sponsored by the History Department

White Collar, and Blue Collar Gig Workers: What is the future of American Labor?

Steven Greenhouse '73

Long time New York Journalist and author of Beaten Down, and Worked Up:  the Past, Present, and Future of American Labor.

Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse

Ethan Pollock is Associate Professor of History and Russian Studies at Brown University

For over a thousand years the banya (or Russian bathhouse) has been a crucial institution to a wide variety of people: men and women, rich and poor, straight and gay, religious and atheist. The omnipresence of the banya makes it a lens through which to view many aspects of Russia history—hygiene, intimacy, sociability, the relationship of Russia to the West. The banya is full of contradictions. It can clean bodies and spread disease. It can purify and befoul. It can create community and provide a means of excluding others. Taken together, thousands of sources ranging from archival documents and municipal regulations to idioms, films, art, cartoons, memoirs, diaries, songs, novels, poems, and plays provide the basis for this unprecedented portrait of the institution of the banya and for a whole new way of seeing the history of Russia.

The Theory and Practice of History

The 2019-20 seminar series will meet four times across the year, usually on Thursdays, and will feature an exciting international and interdisciplinary line up of scholars.

For further information or a copy of the papers once they become available, contact Gary Shaw at gshaw@wesleyan.edu. Here are the dates and current topics. Seminars will be in Boger Hall.

Starting time for all sessions is 4:30.

• November 14: Stefka Eriksen, Norwegian Institute of Cultural Heritage, “The Archaeology and Allegory of the Settlement of Iceland: Reflections on the Theory and Method of Interdisciplinary Environmental History.”  Boger Hall 115
• February 6:  Heather Keenleyside, University of Chicago: “The Literary History of the History of Ideas,”  Boger Hall 113
• March 5: Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, University of Oulu, “How to Get it Wrong: Historiography, Normativity and the Holocaust Debate,”  Boger Hall 113
•  

A Walk into Winter: The 1795 Dutch Embassy to Qing China

Tonio Andrade is professor of history at Emory University. His core geographical area of expertise is China, but his research focuses on interconnections in the Early Modern Period (1500-1800) and on comparative history. He is author of The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History; Lost Colony: The Untold Story of Europe's First War with China and How Taiwan became Chinese. Honors include the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and Gutenberg e-Prize.

The Ethical Choices of Whales: Bowheads, Hunters, and Mutual Adaptations in the Bering Strait, 1848-1968

Bathsheba Demuth, Assistant Professor of History at Brown University

Bowhead whales have been known by three distinct groups of hunters along the Bering Strait over the past two centuries: indigenous Yupik and Inupiaq whalers, capitalist commercial whalers, and communist industrial whalers. This talk looks at how whales became known through the labor of their killing, examining the cosmologies each of these three kinds of whaling practitioners composed around the animals they hunted. How where whales, particularly bowheads, imagined and treated, and how did this change across economic systems?  What kind of emotional relationships were possible? And what kinds of relationships were considered ethical between humans and whales? Did whales make ethical judgments of their hunters? What does including whale behavior in our analysis of human-whale interactions provoke in our historical understanding, and how should we situate non-human actions in human narratives of the past?

Fall 2023-Special Event, Tuesday, November 7

"The Liberatory Power of Guilt: How a Sikh Holy Town Shaped Utopian Dreams of Pakistan"

Tuesday, November 7th at 4:30 pm Judd 116

We welcome guest lecturer, Priya Satia. In this talk, Prof. Satia will explain how, in the era of British colonialism, environmental transformation of a Sikh holy site in a semi-arid region of Punjab became crucial to securing legitimacy in local political contests. The emerging town's particular spiritual culture went on to water various struggles for autonomy--including a vision of Pakistan as a state-sized "dera" (socio-religious residence of a spiritual leader) offering refuge and relief from colonial and casteist orders.

Priya Satia is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History and Professor of History at Stanford University. She is the author of three award-winning books: Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (OUP, 2008); Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Duckworth, 2018); Time's Monster: History, Conscience and Britain's Empire (Penguin, 2020). Her work can also be found in the American Historical Review, Past & Present, Technology & Culture, Humanity, and other scholarly journals and edited volumes. Prof. Satia writes frequently for popular media, such as the Washington Post, Time Magazine, The New Republic, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and other outlets.

Sponsored by the History Department, Fall 2023

Fall 2023-Special Event, Tuesday, October 3

"You Can Never Rest, Because They Keep Coming": On America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created

Tuesday, October 3 at 4:30 pm Boger 114

We welcome guest lecturer, Nick Tabor. Nick Tabor is the author of Africatown:  America's Last Slave Ship and the Community it Created.

Nick Tabor is the author of Africatown: America’s Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created, a blend of history and investigative journalism that traces the development of a neighborhood established by survivors of the last slave voyage to the US. He was a historical consultant on the documentary Descendant, which was presented on Netflix by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company in 2022. He previously worked at daily newspapers and on the editorial staff of New York Magazine. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.

Sponored by Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, The African American Studies Department, The History Department and the CSS 

Fall 2023-Special Lecture, Tuesday, September 26

"A Madman in the White House?  On Sigmund Freud's Unknown Diagnosis of Woodrow Wilson" 

Tuesday, September 26 at 4:30 pm Allbritton 311 

Join us for a talk by a well-known French Historian, Patrick Weil

Patrick Weil is a Florence Rogatz Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School, and a senior research fellow at the French National Research Center in the University of Paris1, Pantheon-Sorbonne. Professor Weil's work focuses on comparative immigration, citizenship, and church-state law and policy. His most recent books are The Madman in the White House. Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (Harvard University Press, 2023) and De La Laïcité en France (Grasset, 2021).

Patrick Weil is also, since 2006, the founder and the chairman of the NGO Libraries Without Borders (Bibliothèques Sans Frontières).

Sponsored by History Department, CSS and the Romance Languages and Literatures Department 

2023 MEIGS LECTURE - Tuesday, April 11 at 4:30 pm

Elizabeth Hinton, Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at Yale University, will deliver the annual Meigs Lecture in US History.

Tuesday, April 11 at 4:30 pm in Boger 114.

Elizabeth Hinton is a historian of American inequality who is considered one of the nation’s leading experts on policing and mass incarceration. Hinton’s past and current scholarship provides a deeper grasp of the persistence of poverty, urban violence, and racial inequality in the United States. She is a Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at Yale University.

Sponsored by the History Department, the Albritton Center for Public Life, the Department of African American Studies, the Center for African American Studies, and the American Studies Department.

Guest Lecturer Gregory Conti gives talk "How to think about Mill's On Liberty"

On Monday, April 10 at 4:30 pm in Boger 114, guest speaker Gregory Conti will give the talk:

"How to think about Mill's On Liberty"

Gregory Conti is assistant professor of politics at Princeton. His research focuses on the history of modern political thought, especially in Britain and France, and on the lessons that can be drawn from that history for contemporary debates in political philosophy. His primary research interests include the relationship between ideas of democracy, liberalism, and representative government; toleration and freedom of speech; Enlightenment political philosophy; the thought of John Stuart Mill and its reception; and modern French political theory. He has published widely in political philosophy and the history of political thought.

Sponsored by the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, the Government Department, the History Department, and the College of Social Studies.

Guest Lecturer Felipe Arturo gives talk "The Migration of Plants"

On Thursday, April 6 at 4:30 pm in FISK 201, we welcome Felipe Arturo, who will give the talk:

"The Migration of Plants"

Felipe Arturo presents a selection of artistic works that span a 15-year period of artistic practice based on the migration of plants in recent history and their impact in contemporary cultural practices.

Co-sponsored by Wesleyan's Center for the Arts Creative Campus Initiative, College of the Environment, Fries Center for Global Studies, Latin American Studies, History Department, and Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

Peter Molin - "Word Wars: Literature, Combat, and the Veteran Voice"

Wednesday, April 5 at 4:30 pm in Allbritton 103

Guest Speaker Peter Molin will give the talk "Word Wars: Literature, Combat, and the Veteran Voice".

Peter Molin is a retired US Army infantry officer who currently teaches in the English Department Writing Program at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He has written extensively on the art, film, and literature of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, most prominently on his blog Time Now, as well as in other media and scholarly outlets. 

Mauricio Tenorio Trillo Talk: On the Useful Pointlessness of History

We welcome guest speaker Mauricio Tenorio Trillo who will give the talk:

"On the Useful Pointlessness of History"

Thursday, March 2 at 4:30 pm in Russell House, 350 High Street

Mauricio Tenorio Trillo is the Samuel N. Harper Professor of History at the University of Chicago and associate professor at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico City.

Event is sponsored by the Allbritton Center for Public Life, History Department, and Latin American Studies (LAST).

Panel Discussion on Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming A Space

Zora Neale Hurston: CLAIMING A SPACE: A PANEL DISCUSSION ON FILMMAKING, BIOGRAPHY, AND HISTORY

Wednesday, February 22 at 4:30 p.m. in Daniel Family Commons

Panelists include: Tracey Heather Strain, Randall Maclowry, Daphne Lamothe.

Moderated by Crystal Feimster and Thomas Allen Harris

Co-Chaired by Jennifer Tucker and Rashida Z. Shaw McMahon

Hosted by History Dept with FGSS, CHUM, AFAM, AMST, ANTHRO, CSS, ENG, REL, & SISP

Talk by Glory M. Liu: "Adam Smith's America"

"Adam Smith's America" 

Wednesday, February 22 at 4:30 p.m. in the Woodhead Lounge, Exley 184

Glory M. Liu is a lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard and author of Adam Smith's America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism (Princeton: 2022). A political theorist and intellectual historian, she received her PhD in political science from Stanford University in 2018 and also holds an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge University. Her works have appeared in journals such as Modern Intellectual History and History of European Ideas and she has also written for outlets such as The Nation, The Washington Post, and Aeon Magazine.

A Virtual Conversation with Writer Patrick Radden Keefe

Thursday, February 9, 4:30-5:30 p.m., online only

Co-Sponsored by The College of Letters, Shapiro Writing Center, The History Department, The Science in Society Program, and the Department of American Studies

Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and author of the New York Times bestsellers Empire of Pain and Say Nothing, as well as two earlier nonfiction books: The Snakehead and Chatter. His most recent book is Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels, and Crooks.

History 300 Distinguished Lecture Fall 2022

The Fall 2022 History 300 Lecture features Helge Jordheim.

"Changing the World One Word at a Time: From Flag to Climate Emergency"

Thursday, November 10 at 4:30 p.m. in Tishler Hall

Helge Jordheim is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Oslo, Norway, and a Visiting Professor at Wesleyan. He has published books and articles on 18th-century Germany, concepts of civilization and the world, universal history, the cultural history of time, and topics related to the theory of history, especially the work of Reinhart Koselleck.

Co-Sponsponsored Event: How Queer Were the Greeks? How Queer Are We?

A talk by University of Michigan Professor David Halperin

Thursday, November 3 at 4:30 p.m. at Russell House.

Sponsored by Classical Studies, History, College of Letters, & Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Special Event: A Conversation with Historian and Filmmaker Christian Delage

"Confronting the violence of images and the pain of others: from the experience of war to the projection of images as judicial evidence"

Wednesday, September 21, 2022 at 4:30 p.m. in Boger Hall 112

History Matters Event: BUSTING MYTHS ABOUT CHINA AND CHINESE POWER

Thursday, April 14, 2022, 12:00 - 1:00 pm in Allbritton 311. Lunch will be provided.

For more information click here.

Strong Bodies for the Revolution: Pursuing Health and Power in the People's Republic of China

CEAS Gallery Exhibition

February 16 - May 13, 2022

This exhibit opens Wednesday, February 16 at 12:15 p.m. at the College of East Asian Studies Gallery at Mansfield Freeman Center starting with a reception starting in the gallery, and then moving to the Seminar Room for remarks by Collections Assistant Sam Smith '20, Assistant Professor of History and East Asian Studies, Ying Jia Tan, and special guest Mark Sidel, son of Ruth and Victor Sidel and donor of the propaganda posters.

The exhibit is co-curated by Ying Jia Tan, Rosemary Lennox, Ben Chaffee, Wendi Field Murray, and Christina Lu '22.

Regular gallery hours during the exhibition are Tuesday through Friday, noon - 4:00 p.m.

Save the Date - May 5, 2022 - Talk by Sam Perry

"Benedetta" Film Screening and Discussion

• On Sunday, December 5, 2021 - the film "Benedetta" was shown at Metro Middletown Cinemas (140 Main Street_ at 2:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. 

• On Monday, December 6, 2021, the leading film director, Paul Verhoeven, joined the Wesleyan community  for a discussion of his latest film, "Benedetta" (2021) with Wesleyan Profs. Lisa Dombrowski and Jennifer Tucker. Click here to access the recording of this event.

• On Tuesday, December 7, 2021, Author and historian Judith Brown joined the Wesleyan comminity for a discussion at Russell House, 5:00 - 6:00 p.m.

History 362 Distinguished Lecture Fall 2021

Thursday, November 11 at 4:30 p.m. in Shanklin 107 (Kerr Lecture Hall):

Annual HISTORY 362 Distinguished Lecture featuring Professor Kenda Mutongi, Professor of History at MIT, "MATATU: Oral History and Popular Transportation in Nairobi"

Book Talk by Ying Jia Tan

Friday, November 5, 12:30 - 2:00 p.m.

Ying Jia Tan is giving a virtual book talk at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. Click here to register.

History Department Open House for Prospective History Majors

Meet faculty and students, and learn more about the precarious perch between visions of the past and hopes for the future.

The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free

Book Talk Featuring Writer, Historian, and Wesleyan Alumna: Paulina Bren

Thursday, October 14, 2021 at 4:30 p.m. in Allbritton 311

Sponsored by the History Department, the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program

Writing Empire: Late 19th Century Ottoman Configurations

History Department Open House

The Travelers Lab

Don’t Miss the Opportunity to Participate in Faculty Research in a Collaborative Digital Humanities Lab…

Data Generation, Analysis, and Vizualization in the Historical Analysis of Travel & Communications.

Apply (& learn!) digital techniques of analysis and visualisation to the study of historical travel and communication in a collaborative lab with Gary Shaw (HIST) & Jesse Torgerson (COL).

What is “CLAC”? The Communist Experience in Russian

We at Wesleyan are now entering the third year of offering “Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum” (or CLAC) courses. These are courses taught in languages other than English, all of which provide students and faculty across the campus with opportunities to deepen their engagement with their subjects through the use and further development of their language and intercultural skills. A list of all the CLAC courses we have offered so far, including those being offered this academic year, is on the Fries Center website.

More than Victims: Medicine, Terror, and Healing in the Atlantic Slave Trade

A talk by Carolyn Roberts

The transatlantic slave trade was the largest, forced oceanic migration in human history. This talk explores the little-known role of medicine in the violent trafficking of millions of enslaved Africans and its legacies today.

2020 MEIGS LECTURE: REAGAN, GORBACHEV, AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR

MELVYN P. LEFFLER is Emeritus Professor of American History at The University of Virginia

This lecture on Reagan, Gorbachev, and the end of the Cold War will assess Reagan’s unique role in ending the forty-year conflict with the “Evil Empire.” Leffler’s assessment is a radical reinterpretation of Reagan’s contributions.

THURSDAY, MARCH 26, 2020 | 4:30 P.M., PAC 001

Sponsored by the History Department

White Collar, and Blue Collar Gig Workers: What is the future of American Labor?

Steven Greenhouse '73

Long time New York Journalist and author of Beaten Down, and Worked Up:  the Past, Present, and Future of American Labor.

Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse

Ethan Pollock is Associate Professor of History and Russian Studies at Brown University

For over a thousand years the banya (or Russian bathhouse) has been a crucial institution to a wide variety of people: men and women, rich and poor, straight and gay, religious and atheist. The omnipresence of the banya makes it a lens through which to view many aspects of Russia history—hygiene, intimacy, sociability, the relationship of Russia to the West. The banya is full of contradictions. It can clean bodies and spread disease. It can purify and befoul. It can create community and provide a means of excluding others. Taken together, thousands of sources ranging from archival documents and municipal regulations to idioms, films, art, cartoons, memoirs, diaries, songs, novels, poems, and plays provide the basis for this unprecedented portrait of the institution of the banya and for a whole new way of seeing the history of Russia.

The Theory and Practice of History

The 2019-20 seminar series will meet four times across the year, usually on Thursdays, and will feature an exciting international and interdisciplinary line up of scholars.

For further information or a copy of the papers once they become available, contact Gary Shaw at gshaw@wesleyan.edu. Here are the dates and current topics. Seminars will be in Boger Hall.

Starting time for all sessions is 4:30.

• November 14: Stefka Eriksen, Norwegian Institute of Cultural Heritage, “The Archaeology and Allegory of the Settlement of Iceland: Reflections on the Theory and Method of Interdisciplinary Environmental History.”  Boger Hall 115
• February 6:  Heather Keenleyside, University of Chicago: “The Literary History of the History of Ideas,”  Boger Hall 113
• March 5: Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, University of Oulu, “How to Get it Wrong: Historiography, Normativity and the Holocaust Debate,”  Boger Hall 113
•  

A Walk into Winter: The 1795 Dutch Embassy to Qing China

Tonio Andrade is professor of history at Emory University. His core geographical area of expertise is China, but his research focuses on interconnections in the Early Modern Period (1500-1800) and on comparative history. He is author of The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History; Lost Colony: The Untold Story of Europe's First War with China and How Taiwan became Chinese. Honors include the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and Gutenberg e-Prize.

The Ethical Choices of Whales: Bowheads, Hunters, and Mutual Adaptations in the Bering Strait, 1848-1968

Bathsheba Demuth, Assistant Professor of History at Brown University

Bowhead whales have been known by three distinct groups of hunters along the Bering Strait over the past two centuries: indigenous Yupik and Inupiaq whalers, capitalist commercial whalers, and communist industrial whalers. This talk looks at how whales became known through the labor of their killing, examining the cosmologies each of these three kinds of whaling practitioners composed around the animals they hunted. How where whales, particularly bowheads, imagined and treated, and how did this change across economic systems?  What kind of emotional relationships were possible? And what kinds of relationships were considered ethical between humans and whales? Did whales make ethical judgments of their hunters? What does including whale behavior in our analysis of human-whale interactions provoke in our historical understanding, and how should we situate non-human actions in human narratives of the past?