The JNBC cordially invites you to a workshop discussing critical issues raised by the celebrated new translation of Karl Marx’s Capital (Princeton UP), “The Standpoint of Marx’s Capital”.

The workshop is the second of two JNBC-hosted events in connection with Professor North’s major new contribution to the study and understanding of Marx’s most famous work.

Workshop: “Popularization as a Problem: Marx/Engels and Benjamin as Examples”, facilitated by Paul North, Kevin McLaughlin and Alexander Gourevitch.

Note: If you registered less than two days prior to the event the two short articles on popularization by Walter Benjamin will be made available upon request from Maria Sokolova.

The JNBC cordially invites you to a lecture by Paul North, co-editor of the celebrated new translation of Karl Marx’s Capital (Princeton UP), “The Standpoint of Marx’s Capital”.

The lecture is the first of two JNBC-hosted events in connection with Professor North’s major new contribution to the study and understanding of Marx’s most famous work. The second event, a workshop, takes place at the JNBC on March 13; separate registration is required for each event.

Lecture: “The Standpoint of Marx’s Capital”, presented by Professor Paul North (Maurice Natanson Professor, Germanic Languages and Literatures, Yale University).

A small reception will follow.

The J. Carter Brown Memorial Lecture Series, curated by History of Art and Architecture Professor Dietrich Neumann, highlights contemporary architects from across the country. Martino Stierli, the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art will share insights into the curators’ research for the upcoming exhibition “Architecture of Liberation: Modernism in West Africa” (July 05, 2026 – January 02, 2027)”

Registration is required.

A collaboration between the office of the Associate Provost for AI and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study, Brainstorm: AI Across the Disciplines – A Conversation Series pairs Brown faculty members from strikingly differing fields of study for lively, extemporaneous and audience-inclusive discussion of the (evolving) roles AI plays in their research and teaching.

This workshop is the second part of a two-day visit by Dr. M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, associate professor of history at American University. With a PhD in American Studies from Brown, her research interests include public history, museum studies, historiography, visual and material culture, communications and media history, and critical theory. She is author of History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s (UNC, 2017). Her current project, “The Historian and the Historian-ish,” is about how content creators – journalists, podcasts, reenactors, influencers – shape public understanding of the past.

This interactive session invites students to bring an example of public-facing or popular history—a museum exhibit, podcast, TikTok, website—to interpret collectively. Using these materials, we will examine how historical knowledge circulates outside academic settings and how audiences actually encounter and interpret the past. We will test and model approaches for analyzing a range of cultural artifacts: foregrounding close reading, comparison, and critical analysis of popular historical forms. 

Light refreshments will be provided in the Seminar Room on the second floor of the Nightingale-Brown House.

The J. Carter Brown Memorial Lecture Series, curated by History of Art and Architecture Professor Dietrich Neumann, highlights contemporary architects from across the country. In this, the first lecture of the 3-lecture series, Amale Andraos and Dan Wood will share their recent projects at WORKac. 

Registration is required. 

A collaboration between the office of the Associate Provost for AI and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study, Brainstorm: AI Across the Disciplines – A Conversation Series pairs Brown faculty members from strikingly differing fields of study for lively, extemporaneous and audience-inclusive discussion of the (evolving) roles AI plays in their research and teaching.

This debut dialogue pairs Economics professor Emily Oster with Physics professor Loukas Gouskos. Active participation from the audience is encouraged and will be moderated by Michael Littman, Associate Provost for AI and Kevin McLaughlin, Director of the JNBC.

Light lunch provided.

Floating Coast is the first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada. The unforgiving territories along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Iñupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia—before American and European colonization. Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, Bathsheba Demuth presents a profound tale of the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that human ambition has brought (and will continue to bring) to a finite planet.

Frances Perkins was the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, the longest-serving Labor Secretary, and an architect of the New Deal. Yet beyond these celebrated accomplishments there is another dimension to Frances Perkins’s story. Without fanfare, and despite powerful opposition, Perkins helped save the lives of countless Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. Based on extensive research, including thousands of letters housed in the National Archives, Dear Miss Perkins adds new dimension to an already extraordinary life story, revealing at last how one woman tried to steer the nation to a better, more righteous course.

This event will take place over two days and consist of several panels where scholars from literary and cultural studies will present papers that take up a number of writers, literary genres, and historical subjects associated with the American Revolution in particular, and the Age of Revolutions (in transatlantic and hemispheric contexts) generally.

This symposium is part of Brown University’s initiative to explore the historical and contemporary meanings of 1776 two hundred and fifty years later. This initiative “Brown 2026” takes a bifocal approach to our moment of historical commemoration by reconsidering the origins of the United States and its contemporary relevance to our own divisive and sometimes violent world of US politics. This project is particularly concerned with the role of the modern university in addressing and preserving democratic political ideals of free speech, open deliberation of contentious issues that face our culture, and the need for intellectual freedom as we engage the nation’s historical past and present.

Fictions of the American Revolution will take place at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study, or it can be accessed remotely. 

Program
Friday, September 26

9:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Panel 1
Title: Origins Stories
Chair: Jacques Khalip (Brown University)

• Jeffrey Insko (Oakland University), “Frederick Douglass’s 1776 Project”
• Drew Lopenzina (Old Dominion University), “’I Appeal to the Lovers of Liberty’: William Apess, Prophet of Democracy”
• Thomas Koenigs (Scripps College), “’Natural Histories of the Heart’: Fiction, Racial Interiority, and the Revolutionary Legacy in the Antebellum Struggle Over Slavery”
• Rodrigo Lazo (University of California, Santa Cruz), “Generals in Their Labyrinths: Bolivar, Washington, and the Mythic Age of Revolutions”

2:00-4:00 p.m.
Panel 2
Title: Re-groundings
Chair: Jim Egan (Brown University)

• Jordan Alexander Stein (Fordham University), “The Real Enemy: Printing and the Historiography of the Declaration of Independence”
• Rachel Trocchio (University of Minnesota), “How Belief Holds: Reading with Conviction in Revolutionary America”
• Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (Northeastern University), “The Sugar Revolution and the American Revolution”

Saturday, September 27

10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Panel 3
Title: Revolutionary Legacies
Chair: Phil Gould (Brown University)

• Anna Brickhouse (University of Virginia), “Unfortunate Fictions”
• Michael Drexler (Bucknell University), “Charles Brockden Brown with Lacan: Fiction and the REAL after the Revolution”
• Michelle Sizemore (University of Kentucky), “Israel Potter, Refugee”

In this stunning volume, acclaimed poet Kwame Dawes explores the mythic ancestral, and spiritual journeys that make up a life. The site of the ruined ancestral home of Kwame Dawes’s family, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is at once a place of myth and, for Dawes, a metaphor of the journeying that has taken him from Ghana, through Jamaica, and to the United States. Whether finding beauty in the quotidian or taking astonishing imaginative leaps, these poems speak movingly of self-reflection, family crises, loss, transcendence, the shattering realities of political engagement, and an unremitting investment in the vivid indeterminacy of poetry. 

Prominent economists Mark Blyth and Nicolò Fraccaroli reveal why inflation happens, how we combat it and how it affects our lives. With accessible and engaging commentary and a good dose of humor, Blyth and Fraccaroli bring the complexities of economic policy and inflation indices down to earth. They argue that 2021 marked the end of an era of relative price stability around the world. Inflation is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the forces shaping our economy. 

Brown 2026 and the JNBC are thrilled to invite Brown community members to an evening of informal conversations with refreshments on September 18th from 5-7pm at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study at 357 Benefit Street, on the patio if weather permits. 

For more details about the Brown 2026 Initiative please see our website: https://brown2026democracy.brown.edu/

“Letters from the Corporation of Brown University: Lives of Usefulness and Reputation, 1764 - 2023”

The Conversation with Lauren Zalaznick will be hosted by Kevin McLaughlin, Director of JNBC, George Hazard Crooker Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and German Studies, Dean Emeritus of the Faculty.

This conversation will focus on Lauren Zalaznick’s edition of letters submitted by members of the Corporation of Brown University after their terms—from 1764 to 2023. These letters provide a window into the role of the Corporation in the long history of the university. They also reflect the country’s key social, cultural, and political transformations throughout the more than 250 years of its existence. One includes an entry from a trustee who was admitted as an undergraduate despite being unable even to afford the application fee; another presents reflections by a member who spearheaded the adoption of Brown’s groundbreaking Open Curriculum. This conversation with Lauren Zalaznick, who has herself served as a Corporation member, provides an opportunity to reflect on the role of this important body in supporting the university as it strives to fulfill its mission to prepare students to lead “lives of usefulness and reputation,” as it is stated in Brown’s charter.

Join the Department of English on February 20 at 5:30 to celebrate the publication of Professor Philip Gould’s latest book, War Power: Literature & the State in the Civil War North (Oxford University Press). 

The event will include a panel discussion moderated by Kevin McLaughlin featuring Colleen Boggs (Dartmouth College), Glenn Hendler (Fordham University), and Timothy Sweet (West Virginia University). A light reception will follow. 

American presidents have often pushed the boundaries established for them by the Constitution; this is the inspirational history of the people who pushed back. Corey Brettschneider shows that these presidents didn’t have the last word; citizen movements brought the United States back from the precipice by appealing to a democratic understanding of the Constitution and pressuring subsequent reform-minded presidents to realize the promise of ‘We the People.’ This is a book about citizens – Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Daniel Ellsberg, and more – who fought back against presidential abuses of power. Their examples give us hope about the possibilities of restoring a fragile democracy.

In The Darkened Light of Faith, Melvin Rogers provides a bold new account of African American political thought through the works and lives of individuals who built this vital tradition—a tradition that is urgently needed today. The book reexamines how figures as diverse as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Billie Holiday, and James Baldwin thought about the politics, people, character, and culture of a society that so often dominated them. An ambitious account of the profound ways African Americans have reimagined democracy, The Darkened Light of Faith offers invaluable lessons about how to grapple with racial injustice and make democracy work.

The 2024 United States presidential election is encapsulated by two hats. One is red and has a familiar campaign slogan on it; the other is printed with a natural camouflage pattern often worn by hunters, with the names of one political party’s candidates on it. Both hats are made of plain-woven cotton with the text embroidered onto it and are lauded for being made in the US. At least one of these hats is advertised as “the most iconic political hat in America.”

Textiles–whether clothing the body, furnishing the home, or adorning public spaces—have long provided a means of political messaging. Our almost constant encounter with this form of material culture in everyday life makes them particularly effective in conveying a broad range of meanings. These political emblems derive from not only the slogans and symbols the textiles broadcast but also their materials and making techniques. This talk will offer a historical overview of how Americans have harnessed textiles—handkerchiefs, bandannas, quilts, curtains, clothing, and more—to express their civic allegiances in both overt and subtle ways, and at both local and national scales.

Marina Moskowitz is currently a Brown 2026 Visiting Senior Fellow at Brown. She came from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she is a Lynn and Gary Mecklenburg Chair in Textiles, Material Culture and Design. She is also a Faculty Director for the Study of Textiles at the Center for Design and Material Culture there.

Brown2026— the faculty-led endeavor to use the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to explore the past and the future of the American democratic project and the research university’s role in American civic culture— is hosting two informal October gatherings to jump start curricular offerings for the 2025-2026 and 2026-2027 academic years.

The steering committee is eager to support team-taught interdisciplinary courses on themes and questions that fall within the Brown2026 charge from President Paxson, as well as to nurture offerings in all divisions and at all levels (including first-year seminars) that would invite undergraduates to grapple with the distinctive role of the university in democratic societies as well as the legacies of the American Revolution.

To begin that conversation, Dean Rashid Zia and Professor Seth Rockman will host two informal October gatherings to meet interested faculty, generate ideas for potential courses, and discuss logistical support for such endeavors. The first meeting will be an informal breakfast on Oct. 8. The second one - a late afternoon gathering on Tuesday, October 22. Please feel free to contact Dean Zia or Seth Rockman for more details. In the meantime, please dream big about potential courses that can help students engage in this important moment.

Brown2026— the faculty-led endeavor to use the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to explore the past and the future of the American democratic project and the research university’s role in American civic culture— is hosting two informal October gatherings to jump start curricular offerings for the 2025-2026 and 2026-2027 academic years.

The steering committee is eager to support team-taught interdisciplinary courses on themes and questions that fall within the Brown2026 charge from President Paxson, as well as to nurture offerings in all divisions and at all levels (including first-year seminars) that would invite undergraduates to grapple with the distinctive role of the university in democratic societies as well as the legacies of the American Revolution.

To begin that conversation, Dean Rashid Zia and Professor Seth Rockman will host two informal October gatherings to meet interested faculty, generate ideas for potential courses, and discuss logistical support for such endeavors. There will be a breakfast meeting on Tuesday, October 8, and a late afternoon gathering on Tuesday, October 22. Please feel free to contact Dean Zia or Seth Rockman for more details. In the meantime, please dream big about potential courses that can help students engage in this important moment.

American Girl Felicity Merriman lived during an age of revolutions. What did historians and toymakers get right about Felicity Merriman’s experience as a girl living through the Revolutionary War era? Join us for a discussion on the enduring popularity of her story and what it says about our culture.

Allison Horrocks is a public historian who lives in Lincoln, RI. Allison is the co-author of Dolls of Our Lives: Why We Can’t Quit American Girl and a forthcoming book on labor history. For more than five years, Allison co-hosted a podcast on history and pop culture that was featured in The New York Times, Marie Claire, and The Paris Review. She works for the National Park Service.

Prof. Newman is Sir Denis Brogan Professor of History (Emeritus), School of Humanities, University of Glasgow. He is the author, most recently, of the prize-winning 2021 book “Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London”.

Arts and Humanities PhD Students are invited to join us for a conversation with Jeremy Eichler. The conversation will be moderated by Annie Kim, Ph.D. candidate in Musicology & Ethnomusicology.

A writer, scholar and critic, Jeremy Eichler is the author of Time’s Echo, a celebrated new book on music, war and memory that was named “History Book of the Year” by The Sunday Timesand hailed as “the outstanding music book of this and several years” by The Times Literary Supplement. Chosen as a notable book of 2023 by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and NPR, Time’s Echo recently won three National Jewish Book Awards including “Jewish Book of the Year,” and was a finalist for the UK’s premier non-fiction award, the Baillie Gifford Prize, whose jury described the book as “a masterpiece of nonfiction writing.”

This spring, Eichler delivers endowed lectures or serves as a featured speaker at Yale, Tufts, Wellesley, Columbia, the University of Virginia, and Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music. At Brown University, he partners with BroadBand Collaborative to present Time’s Echo Live, a new music-and-memory program whose fall premiere was chosen as Musical America’s top Boston event of 2023. In May, he partners with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra in Hamburg for a program celebrating the launch of the book’s German edition, one of eight foreign language translations recently published or forthcoming.

The recipient of an NEH Public Scholar award and a fellowship from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Eichler earned his PhD in modern European history at Columbia and has taught at Brandeis. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorkerand many other national publications, and since 2006, he has served as chief classical music critic of TheBoston Globe.For more information, please visit www.timesecho.com.

Light refreshments will be provided. This is a hybrid event that will take place in person at the Nightingale-Brown House and on Zoom.

Join us for a panel discussion with a writer, scholar and critic, Jeremy Eichler.  Eichler is the author of Time’s Echo, a celebrated new book on music, war and memory that was named “History Book of the Year” by The Sunday Timesand hailed as “the outstanding music book of this and several years” by The Times Literary Supplement. Chosen as a notable book of 2023 by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and NPR, Time’s Echo recently won three National Jewish Book Awards including “Jewish Book of the Year,” and was a finalist for the UK’s premier non-fiction award, the Baillie Gifford Prize, whose jury described the book as “a masterpiece of nonfiction writing.”

Panelists: 

Kevin McLaughlin, George Hazard Crooker University Professor of English, Professor of Comparative Literature, Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study, Dean Emeritus of the Faculty

Katie Freeze Wolf, Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Brown University.

Paul Nahme, Associate Professor of Judaic Studies at Brown University.

Lunch will be provided. Space is limited. RSVP is required.

Shostakovich and Britten shared no common language yet nonetheless forged a friendship unique in the history of modern music. At its core was a shared commitment to creating art that bore authentic witness to the dreams and catastrophes of twentieth-century life. Created by critic-historian Jeremy Eichler and part of Time’s Echo Live, an acclaimed new series bridging the arts with the humanities, this program blends narrative and live performance to open up multiple new perspectives — on the legacy of both composers, on the memory of the Second World War, on the meaning of listening, and on the art of friendship.

Featuring a performance of Shostakovich Piano Trio in E minor, Op. 67 by members of the Borromeo String Quartet and guest artist Haesun Paik. Produced by Broadband Collaborative.

The two-day conference “Translation across Disciplines” highlights cross-departmental interest in the field of translation.  

Please join Brown University faculty and invited guest experts from various fields including languages, literary arts, anthropology, computer science, translation, AI, and linguistics as we explore the various ways translation functions and is used in society today by critically viewing its role through the lens of artistic endeavor, social justice, artificial intelligence, pedagogy, industry, digital humanities, multilingualism and technology.

Panelists and presenters have received some of the highest honors in the field and represent literary and scholarly translators, authors, poets, playwrights, writers, computer scientists, novelists, and faculty.

Please learn more and register at the link below.

The John Nicholas Brown Center (JNBC) became a center for advanced study effective July 1, 2023 with a primary focus on fostering the broad public discussion and the dissemination of academic research across the full range of disciplines. This new plan expands the JNBC’s scope and mission, elevating it beyond its previous focus on public humanities and positioning it as a catalyst for communicating the intrinsic value of academic scholarship in general to the wider public.

On December 6, the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study will host an open house to celebrate the launch of our new center.  Please join us for this reception between 6-8pm.  We look forward to welcoming you and sharing more details about the new plan for the center.