Join Brown 2026 and the Discovery Through Dialogue project for Cross Talk: A Whole Campus, Distinct Disciplines Approach

April 3, 2026, at 5pm: Cross Talk on Labor

On the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, Brown 2026 seeks to highlight the role of the research university within a democratic society. In the spirit of e pluribus unum, our many disciplinary approaches can foster a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts when it comes to tackling urgent and enduring questions, topics, and challenges. At an institution defined by a spirit of curiosity and open inquiry, faculty pursue different modes of investigation, characterized by different ways of posing questions and different methods of finding answers. These disciplinary commitments strengthen Brown’s mission of “discovering, communicating, and preserving knowledge.”

To bring more attention to our distinct disciplinary approaches, Brown 2026 is convening Cross Talk, a series of moderated conversations in which faculty from across the university explain their approaches to a subject or issue.

The first Cross Talk takes on an enduring aspect of the human experience: labor. From the Biblical decree that we shall “eat bread by the sweat of our brow” to the frequent declarations that “the end of work” is near, the issue of labor has preoccupied scholars across the disciplines. It is a topic that engages anthropologists, sociologists, and economists, and artists, philosophers, and literary theorists. It compels the attention of engineers, and computer scientists as readily as it does scholars who investigate labor law, occupational safety, craft traditions, and political movements. Indeed, few topics organize more research across more segments of the university than labor and its experience, its meanings, its valuation, and its potentialities.

This event is part of the Discovery Through Dialogue project, which furthers Brown’s mission by amplifying and fostering new opportunities for meaningful conversations across a wide range of perspectives. Ensuring that Brown continues to unlock knowledge and understanding through productive and respectful dialogue is a shared project of our campus community.

Our first Cross Talk will feature:

Serena Booth, Assistant Professor of Computer Science: Serena Booth is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. She works on fundamental questions in artificial intelligence (AI): how do we specify our goals for these systems, and how should AI interpret our ambiguous, conflicting, and context-sensitive specifications? Serena also studies and addresses the social consequences of building and releasing AI systems, focusing on issues of consumer protection, economic policy, and labor. She earned her PhD from MIT, and previously worked as an AI Policy Advisor in the United States Senate.

Rebecca Liu, Assistant Professor of English: Liu specializes in Asian American literature and global histories of capitalism. Her current book project identifies the centrality of Asian indenture and the contract form for understanding Asian American racialization, labor, and social reproduction from the nineteenth century to the present.

Laura López-Sanders, Associate Professor of Sociology: Laura López-Sanders is an associate professor of sociology at Brown University whose research examines how organizational practices and public policy produce racialized inequality and workplace precarity. Her book, The Manufacturing of Job Displacement (NYU Press, 2024), shows how managers leverage immigration status to restructure shop-floor power and deepen workforce segmentation. Her current mixed-methods project combines American Time Use Survey data, interviews, and data from digital platforms to examine how algorithmic management, gender, and migration status shape time poverty among ride-hail and delivery workers.

Erica Walker, RGSS Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, School of Public Health: Walker is the RGSS Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and founder of Community Noise Lab. Her work is centered on community identified environmental health issues and supports community using real-time monitoring, community surveying, epidemiological studies, and meaningful engagement. She believes in problem solving, infrastructure building, frank conversations, self-reflection, the iterative process, and avoiding dysfunction.

Moderated by Seth Rockman, George L. Littlefield Professor of American History: Rockman is a labor historian whose research highlights the histories of capitalism and class, and the importance of slavery to the understanding of both. His books include Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore and Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery.

This event will be held at the John Carter Brown Library (94 George Street) with refreshments to follow. 

Join the Simmons Center for an artist talk and exhibition opening reception for Sites of Remaking: Port Cities and Our Present.

This exhibition invites visitors to reconsider and recontextualize port cities, centering Black and Indigenous experiences within the global history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its present-day legacies. The exhibition emerged as an artistic companion to the upcoming conference, Reconsidering Port Cities: Critical Commemoration of Slavery, and Transatlantic Legacies, hosted by the Simmons Center, and co-convened with the International Slavery Museum, University of Liverpool and the Center for the Study of International Slavery.

The artist talk will explore interdisciplinary artistic practices around histories and legacies of racial slavery, the built environment and site-making. Curator Ivie Orobaton, A.M. Candidate in Public Humanities, and Artists Jazzmen Lee-Johnson, Spencer Evans, and Kia Lenise will be in conversation with Christopher Roberts, Assistant Professor at RISD.

Support for this exhibition was generously provided by an anonymous donor.

Launched during the 2024-5 academic year, JCB Reads offers former JCB fellows the opportunity to share their recent book publications. These online events are open to anyone who is interested. The link to the Zoom meeting will be published a few days before the event takes place on the individual event page.

Join us on Thursday, April 2, 2026 at noon for a virtual discussion of Katharine Gerbner’s Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2025).

All are welcome!

About the book

In 1760, after the largest slave revolt in the 18th-century British Empire, colonial authorities criminalized the Afro-Caribbean practice of Obeah, branding it a “wicked Art.” Archival Irruptions uncovers the largely unknown history of Obeah before its criminalization. Using neglected multilingual archives, Gerbner reveals that Obeah was a prophetic practice of healing and resistance. She does so by offering a new method to recover repressed histories and challenge dominant narratives by reading for “irruptions”–narrative disruptions within colonial and missionary archives. This method not only redefines the story of Obeah but also offers a powerful tool for uncovering marginalized histories within imperial archives.

Presented by Montagu James, Brown University. 

Discussants:

About the Event

This webinar centers Palestinian voices and expertise in reimagining Gaza’s postwar urban futures. In contrast to dominant international reconstruction discourse and so-called “Riviera-style” schemes, speakers will examine how prevailing policies depoliticize Palestinian space and sideline questions of sovereignty, healing, resilience, and restorative justice. Drawing on lessons from previous postwar reconstruction efforts in Gaza, the event advances decolonial, rights-based, and community-led recovery approaches that position Palestinians as the primary authors of Gaza’s reconstruction.

Discussant: Leila Farsakh
Speakers: Mamoun Besaiso, Akram M. Lilja, and Orwa Switat

Leila Farsakh is a political economist and professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She has written widely on the political economy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and alternative to partition, served on the editorial board of the Journal of Palestine Studies and now on the Palestine/Israel Review. She is the author of Labor Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation (London: Routledge, second edition, 2012) and most recently of Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization Beyond Partition (University of California Press, 2021).

Mamoun Besaiso is a senior adviser to the UN and the European Union, specializing in conflict-affected areas across the MENA region. In Palestine, he was head of the National Team for Gaza Reconstruction under the Palestinian government. In addition, he assumed a leading role in the reconstruction efforts following the wars of 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021. Currently, he provides consultancy services to various international agencies on early recovery and reconstruction in Gaza, Libya, and Iraq. He is also a keynote speaker at numerous conferences and has contributed to the development of policy papers on reconstruction and recovery.

Akram M. Lilja is a cultural heritage specialist and researcher from Gaza, actively leading emergency heritage protection and recovery efforts in Gaza. Dr. Lilja holds a Ph.D. in Sustainable Economic Development and Public Affairs from Cleveland State University, Ohio (2008), and has completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Michigan and Uppsala University in Sweden. During the ongoing war, he has coordinated international expert teams to document damage, assess risks, and develop recovery strategies for historic buildings, archaeological sites, and cultural landmarks across the Gaza Strip (2024–2025). His work connects on-the-ground heritage rescue with long-term planning for resilient and inclusive reconstruction. Additionally, he is leading a number of emergency intervention projects to protect the damaged cultural heritage in Gaza. Dr. Lilja’s expertise lies at the intersection of cultural heritage, conflict, and social resilience.

Orwa Switat is a postdoctoral research associate in Palestinian studies at the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University. Switat is an urban planning scholar with degrees in philosophy, political science, and urban planning. He focuses on the status of groups in planning theory and practice. He has been a Religion and Public Life Fellow in Conflict and Peace at Harvard Divinity School and a visiting scholar in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. In his research, he integrates digitization and visualization with discourse and planning analysis to uncover hidden histories, restore lost heritages, spatialize oral histories, visualize counter-hegemonic narratives, and develop innovative restorative planning approaches.

Global/Antiquity: a pair of panel discussions to mark the launch of Brown’s Center for Global Antiquity.

What is Global Antiquity? What does it mean to you, and what does it mean at Brown? Two panels, one on the theme “antiquity” and one on the theme “global”, will continue the ongoing conversation about how we can come together to study the distant past across times, places, and disciplines. Panelists from a variety of departments will reflect on what these terms mean in their own research, followed by open discussion. All Brown faculty and graduate students are welcome, and anyone who wants to contribute to the ongoing work of defining the CGA’s scope, methods, and ambitions should be there!

Global

What is “global” about global antiquity? Is the globe itself a concept applicable to all cultures? Does working globally mean studying global phenomena, working comparatively, or tracing intercultural contacts in the ancient world – or can we use the methods of global antiquity in a single time and place? 

The March 31st panelists include Professors Jeff Moser (History of Art and Architecture), Felipe Rojas (Egyptology and Assyriology, Archaeology), Leila Blackbird (History) & Amy Russell (Classics, History).

Reception to follow.

Part of the virtual “Journalism and History When History Is News” series.

Starting in March 2026, more than a dozen scholars will offer short online introductions to key topics in the broad period of the American Revolution as part of the JCB’s 2026 and Beyond initiative.

Join us on Tuesday, March 31 at 4 p.m. for a virtual conversation about Common Sense and more with Joseph Rezek, Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Boston University.

Previous events from this series have been posted on the JCB YouTube channel.

Register here!

The history of Muslim political thought in the disputed Kashmir region of South Asia has largely been narrated within the parameters of national frameworks of India and Pakistan, and often overdetermined by security concerns. This talk by historian Suvaid Yaseen addresses the inadequacies of the colonial and postcolonial archives when it comes to Muslim actors and suggests alternative lines of inquiry.

The talk reflects upon a range of literary materials actually produced by the intellectuals of Islamic movements in Kashmir, and it proposes listening as a practice, as well as a metaphor, to question hitherto employed analytical and narrative categories. In doing so, it examines the complexities of Islamic articulations in Kashmir on its own terms.

Free and open to the public, but please register. Lunch will be available starting at 12:15 pm for registered participants.

For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.

About the Speaker

Suvaid Yaseen is a historian of South Asia, with an interest in contested sovereignties, Islam, and intellectual history. He completed his Ph.D. in History from Brown University, and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Asian Studies program at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.

About the “South Asian Modernisms” Series

In recent years, the view of modernism as a narrowly European and North American movement restricted to literary and artistic innovation has been challenged on two fronts. Scholars have drawn attention to transnational circuits and sites of modernism, and to non-Western influences and networks for European modernism. As well, modernism is now understood as an interdisciplinary and engaged outlook incorporating anarchist, anticolonial, feminist, racially marginalized, caste, and gender dissidents across the world. This lecture series organized by the Humanities in the World initiative at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, builds on new directions in modernist studies through the lens of South Asian modernisms in the long 20th century, across diverse regions, languages, and communities, and as a supplement to anticolonial and postcolonial viewpoints of the era.

Join us for Visualizing the Age of Revolutions: A Conversation with the Curators of the Brown 2026 Exhibits at the John Carter Brown Library on Friday, March 20, 2026 at 4 p.m.

This event will feature Gwendolyn Collaço, Anne SK Brown Curator for Military and Society, John Hay Library and Karin Wulf, Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian, John Carter Brown Library. Their discussion will be moderated by José Montelongo, Maury A. Bromsen Curator of Latin American Books, John Carter Brown Library.

Attendees will have an opportunity to view the JCB’s current exhibition, “1776 Across the Americas.” A reception will follow.

This event will be hybrid. To register for the online event, please use this link.

The Center for Global Antiquity proudly presents a workshop by Professor Xin Wen (Princeton University), A Palimpsest of Empires: Living with the Deep Time in China’s Ancient Capital

The city of Chang’an (modern Xi’an in China’s Shaanxi Province) area served as the capital of the most important imperial dynasties in early and medieval China, including the Western Zhou (1046–771 BCE), the Qin (221–207 BCE), the Western Han (202 BCE–9 CE), the Sui (581–619), and the Tang (618–907). This paper, which is conceived as the first chapter of my monograph on the post-Tang history of Chang’an, offers a survey of the history of Chang’an from its earliest urban settlements to the end of the Tang dynasty. I begin with the earliest residents of the region and trace the rise of urban structures in the Western Zhou dynasty, the first appearance of an imperial capital in Xi’an in the Qin dynasty, the construction of the Han capital of Chang’an, and the Sui emperor’s decision to build a newer and grander Chang’an just to the southeast of the Han capital. The paper describes in detail the palaces, walls, ponds, canals, governmental offices, residential areas, markets and religious institutions that existed in these successive urban structures, and shows that these structures, although chronologically distinct, were geographically related. For example, the Sui-Tang city was only a few hundred meters removed from the abandoned Han city, and the northwestern corner of the Sui-Tang city was built upon a few key Han suburban structures. Such successive waves of construction produced an urban space that resembled a palimpsest, and the ghosts of dead Chang’an residents and old things continued to attach themselves to the sites of their tombs and houses and reemerged when disturbed. Later residents of Chang’an thus had to cope with this deep history of the city and remake their own urban existence in this deep time.

This workshop is an installment of Past Forward: Engaging with Deep Time in the 21st Century, a series of lectures and workshops funded by the Charles K. Colver Lectureships & Publications Fund.

Registration is gently encouraged, though not required. 

Iris Moon, Associate Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, will deliver the second of the History of Art and Architecture’s 2025-26 “Implements of Impression” themed lecture series. Her talk, From Impression to Projection: Making Fantasies in the Chinoiserie designs of the Preissler Workshop, will explore the ways in which these Bohemian decorators of porcelain transformed Chinoiserie in the early eighteenth century from a style in Europe that described rare luxuries imported from Asia, into a domestic European idiom that activated surfaces into sites of fantasy and projection.

The Center for Global Antiquity proudly presents a lecture by Professor Xin Wen (Princeton University), An Envoy State: Turfan and the Integration of Late Antique Eurasia.

In our understanding of medieval trans-Eurasian connections, large political entities such as the Byzantine empire and the Tang empire are often seen as the main upholders and drivers. But even at the heights of their powers, these empires did not have control over the entirety of Eurasia. So who was maintaining trans-Eurasian connections in the absence of—and in the spaces between—empires in the medieval time? In this lecture, I examine the case of the Central Asian kingdom of Turfan from the fifth to the seventh century. The history of this kingdom during this period is known to us thanks to its medieval residents’ peculiar practice of clothing the dead bodies with used papers, including government documents, and its arid climate that helped preserve these documents. From them, we can see that an extraordinary number of travelers from Byzantine, India, China, and the Steppe world converged in Turfan, not typically as their destinations, but as a stop to other large states. In response, the kingdom of Turfan devoted outsized resources both material and human to the receiving, accommodating, and protecting these travelers. In this way, Turfan fashioned itself into what I call an “envoy state,” a state whose administrative functions disproportionately served travelers from other, larger states. States like Turfan, I argue, was indispensable in the maintenance of long-distance connections in and the cultural and political integration of Eurasia in the medieval time.

This lecture is an installment of Past Forward: Engaging with Deep Time in the 21st Century, a series of lectures and workshops funded by the Charles K. Colver Lectureships & Publications Fund.

Registration required, please register below.

Join us for a roundtable event on the new edited volume, Decolonizing Afghanistan: Countering Imperial Knowledge and Power (Duke UP; edited by Wazhmah Osman and Robert D. Crews).

Book contributors will come together with Brown faculty to discuss the first comprehensive volume to explore the impact of empire on Afghanistan’s past and present. This new collected volume features cross-disciplinary, ground-up perspectives on colonial projects in Afghanistan and paths to decolonial futures. In conversation with the work of the Watson School’s Costs of War project, the collection focuses on the US intervention that began in 2001 and marks a decolonial turn in Afghanistan and American studies.

This event will feature contributors Ali Karimi (University of Calgary) and Wazhmah Osman (Temple University) speaking on topics including surveillance infrastructures in Afghanistan, Afghan American involvement in US military role-playing training, and the entanglement of US imperialism in development projects.

With discussants:

Faiz Ahmed (Department of History, Brown University)

Nadje Al-Ali (Department of Anthropology, Middle Eastern Studies, and Watson School, Brown University)

Stephanie Savell (Watson School/ Costs of War, Brown University)

What does it mean to be Latino in the United States today?

As one of the nation’s fastest-growing and most fluid racial categories, “Latino” carries histories of migration, struggle, creativity, and resistance. In Our Migrant Souls, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Héctor Tobar offers a deeply personal and timely exploration of Latinidad—one shaped by colonialism, immigration, public policy, and popular culture.

Join us for a conversation with Héctor Tobar as he reflects on the historical forces and lived experiences that define Latino identity today, and centers the voices, questions, and futures of young Latino people navigating belonging in a divided moment.

Stop by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (96 Waterman Street) to pick up a free copy of Our Migrant Souls while supplies last!
Or email CSREA@brown.edu to schedule a pickup time.

This is a hybrid event. 

For more information on fieldwork opportunities for students, visit go.brown.edu/dig

About the Event

On February 28, the United States and Israel launched an attack on Iran, killing the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with several military commanders. The attack prompted an Iranian retaliation against U.S. allies in the Middle East and sparked a broader regional conflagration. In its first few days, hundreds have been killed, physical infrastructure has been damaged and destroyed, and global trade and travel have seen significant disruptions. Join Brown professors Nadje Al-Ali, Stephen Kinzer, Elias Muhanna, and Michelle Quay for a community conversation about the implications of these events for Iran, the Middle East and the world.

About the Speakers

Nadje Al-Ali is Robert Family Professor of International Studies and professor of anthropology and Middle East Studies. Her main research interests revolve around feminist activism and gendered mobilization, mainly with reference to Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and the Kurdish political movement. Her publications include “What kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq” (2009, University of California Press, co-authored with Nicola Pratt); “Women and War in the Middle East: Transnational Perspectives” (Zed Books, 2009, co-edited with Nicola Pratt); “Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present” (2007, Zed Books), and “Resisting Far-Right Politics in the Middle East and Europe: Queer Feminist Critiques”(ed. With Tunay Altay and Katharina Galor, University of Edinburgh Press, 2024).

Stephen Kinzer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has covered more than 50 countries on five continents. His articles and books have led the Washington Post to place him “among the best in popular foreign policy storytelling.”

Kinzer spent more than 20 years working for the New York Times, most of it as a foreign correspondent. His foreign postings placed him at the center of historic events and, at times, in the line of fire. He has been writing about Iran for decades.

In 1997 Kinzer covered the election campaign in which Mohammad Khatami was elected president of Iran. He has returned to Iran several times since then and traveled across much of the country, including twice as a tour guide.

In 2003 Kinzer published “All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror.” It was the first full-length study of the 1953 coup in which the CIA and its British partners organized the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Gore Vidal wrote that the book was “as gripping as a thriller.” John Le Carre called it “a well-researched object lesson in the dismal folly of so-called nation building” that should lead America and British readers to “blush with shame.” It has been widely translated and is available not only in German, Spanish, and Portuguese, but also Farsi, Greek, Hebrew, Turkish, Serbo-Croatian, and Bengali.

This year Kinzer is teaching a seminar at Brown called “Iran and the Islamic Republic.”

Elias Muhanna is an associate professor of comparative literature and history at Brown and director of the Center for Middle East Studies. He is a scholar of Classical Arabic Literature and medieval Islamic history, with a focus on the encyclopedic traditions of the Islamic world, the history of the Arabic language, and the cultural production of the Mamluk Empire. Muhanna is a frequent commentator on contemporary politics and culture in the Middle East, and his essays and criticism appear regularly in the mainstream press. He has written for The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Times, The Nation, and other periodicals.

Michelle Quay is a scholar, researcher and translator working on Iranian literature and culture. She holds a Ph.D. in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she studied as a Gates Scholar, and teaches courses at Brown related to Persian language, Iranian culture, cinema, and history.

Global/Antiquity: a pair of panel discussions to mark the launch of Brown’s Center for Global Antiquity.

What is Global Antiquity? What does it mean to you, and what does it mean at Brown? Two panels, one on the theme “antiquity” and one on the theme “global”, will continue the ongoing conversation about how we can come together to study the distant past across times, places, and disciplines. Panelists from a variety of departments will reflect on what these terms mean in their own research, followed by open discussion. All Brown faculty and graduate students are welcome, and anyone who wants to contribute to the ongoing work of defining the CGA’s scope, methods, and ambitions should be there!

Antiquity

What are the stakes of defining the distant past as “antiquity”? When does antiquity begin and end? Are its limits and definitions the same in different places, or for different disciplines? What do researchers of these periods share, and what distinguishes them from others in their field working in more recent time?

The March 9th panelists are Professors Steve Houston (Anthropology), Matthew Rutz (Egyptology and Assyriology) & Amy Russell (Classics, History). 

Reception to follow. 

differences, a journal of feminist cultural studies housed at the Pembroke Center, will host its third annual Limits of Legibility colloquium on Friday, March 6, 2026. Work presented will address questions such as: How does critical history address the impasse between conventional history, on the one hand, and aggressive authoritarian rewriting of history, on the other? Given critical history’s theoretical critique of the positivist understanding of facts, what is its response to the assertion of “alternative facts”? And what impact, if any, can it have on current battles as to what counts as history?

Guest speakers will include:

• Joan Wallach Scott (Institute for Advanced Study)
• Omnia El Shakry (Yale University)
• Korey Williams (University of Chicago)
• Gary Wilder (City University of New York)

This event is free and open to the public.

Join us for an author discussion of Shirley Chisholm in Her Own Words, a new book edited by Zinga A. Fraser, the leading scholar dedicated to the study of Chisholm’s legacy.

Thursday, March 5, 2026, from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the Racial Justice Resource Center on the second floor of the Rockefeller Library. Free and open to the public.

Many Americans are familiar with Chisholm’s importance as the first Black woman in Congress and the first woman and African American to run for president with either major party. This long-overdue treatment of her work establishes Chisholm as an unparalleled public intellectual and Black feminist both in her time and now. The book not only contextualizes the Civil Rights and Black Power era, it also provides timeless insights on issues that are exceedingly relevant in our current moment. Featuring a captivating introduction by Fraser, Shirley Chisholm in Her Own Words introduces a new generation to one of the most impactful proponents of democracy in America.

Zinga A. Fraser

Dr. Zinga A. Fraser is an author, lecturer, historical consultant and curator. She is the Director of the Shirley Chisholm Project on Brooklyn Women’s Activism. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in the Africana Studies Department and Women’s and Gender Studies program at Brooklyn College. Dr. Fraser is a foremost expert on Shirley Chisholm and Black Congressional Women and Black feminist politics and culture. She served as the historical consultant on the Netflix feature “Shirley,” written and directed by John Ridley and starring the film’s producer, Regina King. She was the co-curator Shirley Chisholm at 100: Changing the Face of Democracy, which is the first major museum exhibition on the life and legacy of Shirley Chisholm at the Museum of the City of New York that closed in July. Dr. Fraser has published several works including her most recent book, Shirley Chisholm: In her Own Words a Collection of Speeches and Writings, which explores Chisholm’s intellectual legacy under the University of California Press, and is currently completing her book manuscript titled, Sister Insider/ Sister Outsider: Shirley Chisholm and Barbara Jordan, Black Women’s Politics in the Post- Civil Rights Era. She has appeared on local, national and international news outlets such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine, AP Press, Essence Magazine, History Channel, Elle Magazine docuseries, Buzzfeed News, C-SPAN, The History Channel, BBC- Africa, NY1 and WNBC-TV, WABC- TV, WCBS-TV, USA Today, National Public Radio and a host of more. She is a well sought after speaker at colleges, universities, foundations and organizations.

Before entering academia, Dr. Fraser was a Legislative Assistant on Capitol Hill. Dr. Fraser has won numerous fellowships and awards from the American Association of University Women (AAUW), American Political Science Association, Columbia and Northwestern University and the Delta Research and Educational Foundation. She holds a doctorate in African American Studies from Northwestern University, and a Master’s of Arts from the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University and Undergraduate degree in Political Science and African American Studies from Temple University. Dr. Fraser abides by one of Shirley Chisholm’s most famous quotes: “Service is rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth.”

Keisha N. Blain

Dr. Keisha N. Blain, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and Class of 2022 Carnegie Fellow, is a renowned historian of the 20th century United States with broad interests and specializations in African American History, the modern African Diaspora, and Women’s and Gender Studies. She is a Professor of Africana Studies and History at Brown University and an affiliated faculty member in American Studies and in the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies.

Dr. Blain is the author and editor of eight books, including Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), winner of the 2018 First Book Award from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and the 2019 Darlene Clark Hine Award from the Organization of American Historians; Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America (Beacon Press, 2021), finalist for the 2022 NAACP Image Award and the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award; and (with Ibram X. Kendi) Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 (Penguin Random House/One World, 2021), which debuted at #1 on the New York Times Best Sellers list.

Her latest book, Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights (W.W. Norton, 2025), was longlisted for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence. The book offers a sweeping history of human rights told through the ideas and experiences of Black women in the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present. Dr. Blain is now completing a book for W.W. Norton entitled Black Thinkers: The Global Impact of Black Intellectual Thought.

Sponsors

Sponsored by Department of Africana Studies/Rites and Reason Theatre, Department of History, Brown 2026, and the Brown University Library.

Please join us for a lecture by Professor Omar Valerio-Jiménez.

About the speaker: Omar Valerio-Jiménez is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is the author of two award-winning books. His latest book, Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship (University of North Carolina Press, 2024), analyzes the ways in which memories of the U.S.-Mexico War have shaped Mexican Americans’ civil rights struggles, writing, oral discourse, and public rituals.

Our faculty panel (Jana Mokrisova, Matthew Rutz) will talk through and take questions on the stages of an academic job search. If you’re thinking of going on the market next year, this is for you - and come along even if you are earlier in your graduate career or aren’t sure about pursuing an academic job, to get a sense of what awaits and connect with other students in the same position. Open to all graduate students with an interest in the ancient world.

Refreshments served!

Despite the highly abstract nature of his subject, Benoit B. Mandelbrot, the father of fractal mathematics, suffered endless travails of a mundane kind relatable to anyone in the computer age: printer problems. Mandelbrot discussed these headaches at great length in his books, but with good reason, as his writings are filled with an abundance of self-produced images. For Mandelbrot — who referred to himself as an artist as much as a mathematician — to do math meant making pictures, and to make pictures meant fighting with the printer.

This talk by scholar William J. Stewart considers the significance of Mandelbrot’s printouts for media histories of the computer and for an idiosyncratic return of intuitive, visual logics in an era otherwise dominated by symbolic registers of code. By tracing the multiple significances of “dust” — physical and metaphysical alike — in this passage of mathematics, the talk poses questions about resolution in the context of digitalization, but also about the shared border between mathematics and art-making, as it considers the appearance of such “mathematical dust” in the work of contemporary artists including Hito Steyerl and Tauba Auerbach.

Free and open to the public.For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.

About the Speaker

William J. Stewart is a scholar of cultural history, media studies, and theories of art and architecture in 20th- and 21st-century Europe, and is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. His research focuses particularly on the impact that mathematical discourses around quantification, axiomatics, and abstraction have had on cultural production and definitions of the human being, especially in the postwar Germanies. He has published on figures such as the philosopher of technology Max Bense and the artist Hanne Darboven, and his writing has appeared in October, Grey Room, Zeitschrift für Medien-und Kulturforschung (ZMK), and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He received his Ph.D. jointly from the Department of German and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton University. During the 2018–2019 academic year, he was a Fulbright scholar at the IKKM center for media philosophy and cultural techniques in Weimar, Germany.

Presented by the Collaborative Humanities Lab “Models-Scale-Context: AI and the Humanities” at the Cogut Institute, led by Holly Case and Suresh Venkatasubramanian, in conjunction with the graduate seminar “From Big Data to Lilliputians: Considerations of Scale Across the Disciplines,” taught by Holly Case with Brown faculty and external guests.

Panelists: 

Patrick D. Flores - Chief Curator, National Gallery Singapore and the Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor, New York University 

Elaine Ayers - History Department and Museum Studies Program, Yale University 

Hannah Liongoren - Nature-Culture-Sustainability-Studies Program, RISD

Anthony D. Medrano - Assistant Professor of History, Brown University 

This two day workshop brings together international scholars to reflect on the formation and transformation of Israel Studies as an academic field and its potential reconfiguration within an expanded framework of Israel and Israel–Palestine Studies. Registration required.

This event is for the Brown community only.
Proof of registration and current Brown ID required for entry.
Bags and backpacks are subject to inspection.
Photography and recordings are not permitted.

Register to attend

Registration closes at noon on

Wednesday, February 25, 2026

Re-Thinking Israel Studies: Power, Politics, and Academic Responsibility

Organized by: Paul Nahme and Katharina Galor (Brown University)

Dates: March 1–2, 2026

Rationale and Objectives

This workshop brings together international scholars to reflect on the formation and transformation of Israel Studies as an academic field and its potential reconfiguration within an expanded framework of Israel and Israel–Palestine Studies.

Since the 1980s, Israel Studies has sought to define itself between Jewish Studies and Middle East Studies, often as a corrective to the perceived limitations of each field. Whether these limitations are rooted in the methodological priorities of these disciplines, or in larger meta narratives surrounding the seemingly intractable Israel-Arab and Israeli-Palestinian narratives of conflict is one of the key questions this workshop will interrogate. Scholarship must be rooted in commitment to humanistic and open inquiry, no matter how unflattering the possible answers to research questions might be. Thus, with an eye to historicizing the institutional growth of the field of Israel Studies across North American and international universities, this workshop aims to understand how the field has secured and continues to maintain an academic foothold, despite lingering questions about the relationship among scholarship, philanthropy, advocacy, politics, and public discourse.

In recent years, Israel Studies has become a site of innovative theoretical work, with self reflexive and critical scholarship gaining influence, incorporating feminist, decolonial, and transnational perspectives while engaging directly with Palestine Studies. These developments invite reconsideration of the field’s intellectual boundaries, institutional dynamics, and ethical responsibilities, and, most importantly, the perception of particular biases rooted in unspoken assumptions about the field as a whole.

This workshop will explore the historical foundations of Israel Studies, its intersections with adjacent fields and disciplines, and its redefinition within a broader interdisciplinary framework. It aims to foster open and substantive dialogue among scholars whose work challenges, expands, and reimagines the field.

Workshop Program

Sunday, March 1

3:00 – 3:30 p.m.

Opening Remarks

Paul Nahme and Katharina Galor (Brown University)

Welcome and introduction to the workshop. This session outlines the historical and institutional background of Israel Studies, introduces the workshop’s objectives, and frames the key questions that will guide the discussions.

3:30 – 4:45 p.m.

Session 1 – The Making of Israel Studies: Histories and Institutions

Explores the institutional and intellectual formation of Israel Studies and its early separation from Jewish Studies and Middle East Studies.

Participants: Arie Dubnov (George Washington University), Jonathan Gribetz (Princeton University), Derek Penslar (Harvard University)

Chair: Erica Weiss (Brown University)

4:45 – 5:15 p.m.

Coffee Break

5:15 – 6:30 p.m.

Session 2 – Re-Framing the Field: From Israel Studies to Israel/Palestine  Studies

Considers how the field’s boundaries are being re-imagined in U.S. academia through new institutional models, interdisciplinary collaborations, and evolving ethical commitments.

Participants: Hilary Falb Kalisman (University of Colorado Boulder), Anwar Mhajne (Stonehill College), Lihi Ben Shitrit (New York University)

Chair: Elias Muhanna (Brown University)

Monday, March 2

9:00 – 10:15 a.m.

Session 3 – Universities, Donors, and Academic Freedom

Explores the institutional forces that shape how Israel and Palestine are studied in universities today, considering the impact of endowments, donors, and administrative frameworks on research agendas and public discourse.

Participants: Dotan Greenvald (Boston University), Liora Halperin (University of Washington), Alexander Kaye (Brandeis University), Dov Waxman (UCLA)

Chair: Omer Bartov (Brown University)

10:15 – 10:45 a.m.

Coffee Break

10:45 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Session 4 – Scholarship, Advocacy, and Critique

Examines how scholars negotiate the intersection of ethics, research, and public life in relation to Israel and the academy.

Participants: Michael Barnett (George Washington University), Oded Haklai (Queen’s University, Canada), Lior Libman (Binghamton University)

Chair: Ruth Ben Artzi (Providence College)

12:15 – 1:30 p.m.

Session 5 – Futures and Responsibilities: Israel Studies in Global  Perspective

A collective discussion of emerging directions, ethical commitments, and the evolving scope of the field.

Participants: All invited speakers

Moderators: Paul Nahme and Katharina Galor (Brown University)

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.

This research project, proposed by Gwendolyn Collaço, Faiz Ahmed and Karin Wulf, was the winner of a CMES funding competition in Spring 2025.

About:

Although attention to American interactions with the Islamic world have often foregrounded contemporary conflicts and geopolitics, the United States has long been in contact with Islamicate societies through the circulation of peoples, commodities, artworks and texts. Throughout the long 19th century, insurrections in Islamicate societies—of Greeks against the Ottoman Empire, Algerians against the French and Indians against the British—had particular resonances in American society. This year-long research project examines this rich history of encounters, characterized by a mix of solidarity, fascination and exoticization, and the role that they played in defining America’s early identity.

Engaging with questions of foreign trade, slavery, civil discord and humanitarianism, the initiative explores these topics in collaboration with other units on campus. The symposium will expand upon these themes.

Symposium Program

In the contemporary, people are engaging in forms of historical practice that allow them to act in the role of the historian—whether that means assembling and displaying an archive of materials or images online; contesting a historical institution’s claim over interpretation or archival materials; or sharing information on social media in the authoritative voice of the lecturer or guide.

This talk examines how the paradigm came to be and what it has meant for the historical profession, and for American society as a whole. By analyzing how historical expertise is performed, circulated and contested, the speaker argues that embracing the Historian-ish offers opportunities to expand publication, rethink authority in historical discourse and foster a more participatory and inclusive practice of history in contemporary American society.

Presented by M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, Ph.D. ’12 in American Studies from Brown University. 

Join us virtually on February 24, 2026 at 5:30 p.m. EST for a panel discussion featuring JCB Director Karin Wulf, Laurent Dubois (University of Virginia), Nicole Hemmer (Vanderbilt University), and Martha Jones (Johns Hopkins University).

For 2026, the John Carter Brown Library is hosting a series of events titled Journalism and History When History Is News about the important relationship between journalism and history. Supporting excellent journalistic coverage of the events of 250 years ago, and exploring how historians and journalists work in parallel and often synergistic ways, this series is part of a project supported by the Emerson Collective, and in partnership with The Atlantic.

Register here: https://brown.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_F_OwjGiISpaMzxf1FyhfzQ.

About the speakers

Laurent Dubois is the John L. Nau III Bicentennial Professor in the History & Principles of Democracy at the University of Virginia. He is a specialist on the history and culture of the Atlantic world who studies the Caribbean (particularly Haiti), North America, and France.

Nicole Hemmer is a political historian at Vanderbilt University specializing in media, conservatism, and the presidency. Her scholarship and teaching focus on the interplay of social movements, electoral politics, and political culture in order to probe the complexities of political identity and practice in the 20th century United States.

Martha Jones is a writer, historian, legal scholar and public intellectual whose work is devoted to understanding the politics, culture, and poetics of Black America. Her creative practice is rooted in the personal essay.

About the series

Is journalism the “first rough draft of history?” Journalists and historians often work in tandem, serving as one another’s sources for primary research and background information. Sometimes the relationship is tense, with historians wishing for fuller context in reported news, and journalists likely wishing that historians better understood what it means to cover events as they’re unfolding. It’s much too simple, though, to say that historians stick in the past, and journalists in the present. Historians have always regularly worked looking forward, with a consciousness of development in their own time, and journalists regularly reach back to explain the right now in terms of what came before.

But what happens when history is the news? In 2026 both journalists and historians are covering the American Revolution, a sprawling cultural, military and political phenomenon. In short, we have much to share.

For 2026, the John Carter Brown Library is hosting a series of events about the important relationship between journalism and history. Supporting excellent journalistic coverage of the events of 250 years ago, and exploring how historians and journalists work in parallel and often synergistic ways, this series is part of a project supported by Emerson Collective, and in partnership with The Atlantic.

The series begins with four online interviews in February 2026 with historians and journalists who think and work historically and journalistically. Over four events, Karin Wulf will be in conversation with Jamelle Bouie, a columnist for The New York Times; John Dickerson, a reporter and anchor most recently for CBS Evening News; Jennifer Scheussler, a reporter for The New York Times; and a panel of historians including Laurent Debois of Duke University, Nicole Hemmer of Vanderbilt University, and Martha Jones of Johns Hopkins University.

On Thursday, February 19, Distinguished University Professor of English Mary Helen Washington (University of Maryland, College Park) will speak about her forthcoming book. Paule Marshall: A Writer’s Life (Yale UP, 2026) is a biography of novelist Paule Marshall, whose fiction portrays Black women’s experiences across the African diaspora. This event will celebrate the release of Washington’s monograph, as well as the planned contribution of her papers and Marshall’s to the Pembroke Center’s Black Feminist Theory Collection.

This event is co-sponsored by the departments of English and Africana Studies/Rites and Reasons Theatre.

Paule Marshall: A Writer’s Life is available for purchase.

Free and open to the public.

Event accessibility information: To bypass stairs, visitors may enter via the automatic doors at the rear of the building, where there is a wheelchair-accessible elevator.

Join us virtually on February 17, 2026 at 5 p.m. EST for a conversation between JCB Library Director Karin Wulf and Jennifer Schuessler, a journalist covering intellectual life and the world of ideas for the Culture section of The New York Times. Prior to joining the NYT in 2005, she worked at The New York Review of Books and at The Boston Globe.

For 2026, the John Carter Brown Library is hosting a series of events titled Journalism and History When History Is News about the important relationship between journalism and history. Supporting excellent journalistic coverage of the events of 250 years ago, and exploring how historians and journalists work in parallel and often synergistic ways, this series is part of a project supported by the Emerson Collective, and in partnership with The Atlantic.

Register here: https://brown.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_EiO3Xm_aQReDr_PMrGKr1Q.

About the series

Is journalism the “first rough draft of history?” Journalists and historians often work in tandem, serving as one another’s sources for primary research and background information. Sometimes the relationship is tense, with historians wishing for fuller context in reported news, and journalists likely wishing that historians better understood what it means to cover events as they’re unfolding. It’s much too simple, though, to say that historians stick in the past, and journalists in the present. Historians have always regularly worked looking forward, with a consciousness of development in their own time, and journalists regularly reach back to explain the right now in terms of what came before.

But what happens when history is the news? In 2026 both journalists and historians are covering the American Revolution, a sprawling cultural, military and political phenomenon. In short, we have much to share.

For 2026, the John Carter Brown Library is hosting a series of events about the important relationship between journalism and history. Supporting excellent journalistic coverage of the events of 250 years ago, and exploring how historians and journalists work in parallel and often synergistic ways, this series is part of a project supported by Emerson Collective, and in partnership with The Atlantic.

The series begins with four online interviews in February 2026 with historians and journalists who think and work historically and journalistically. Over four events, Karin Wulf will be in conversation with Jamelle Bouie, a columnist for The New York Times; John Dickerson, a reporter and anchor most recently for CBS Evening News; Jennifer Scheussler, a reporter for The New York Times; and a panel of historians including Laurent Debois of Duke University, Nicole Hemmer of Vanderbilt University, and Martha Jones of Johns Hopkins University.

As a journalist for the Minnesota Star Tribune, Sofia Barnett (History, ’25) has been covering recent events in Minneapolis. The event will feature Sofia in conversation with Professor Robert Self, Mary Ann Lippitt Professor of American History, on her work and experiences as a journalist in the Twin Cities. 

Join us virtually on February 13, 2026 at 4 p.m. EST for a conversation between JCB Library Director Karin Wulf and award-winning journalist and author John Dickerson. A contributing writer at The Atlantic, Dickerson has worked as a reporter and television anchor; most recently, he was co-anchor of the “CBS Evening News” and chief political analyst for CBS News.

For 2026, the John Carter Brown Library is hosting a series of events titled Journalism and History When History Is News about the important relationship between journalism and history. Supporting excellent journalistic coverage of the events of 250 years ago, and exploring how historians and journalists work in parallel and often synergistic ways, this series is part of a project supported by the Emerson Collective, and in partnership with The Atlantic.

Register here: https://brown.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_x20Z9K9AQoWXd31HGGoa3g.

About the series

Is journalism the “first rough draft of history?” Journalists and historians often work in tandem, serving as one another’s sources for primary research and background information. Sometimes the relationship is tense, with historians wishing for fuller context in reported news, and journalists likely wishing that historians better understood what it means to cover events as they’re unfolding. It’s much too simple, though, to say that historians stick in the past, and journalists in the present. Historians have always regularly worked looking forward, with a consciousness of development in their own time, and journalists regularly reach back to explain the right now in terms of what came before.

But what happens when history is the news? In 2026 both journalists and historians are covering the American Revolution, a sprawling cultural, military and political phenomenon. In short, we have much to share.

For 2026, the John Carter Brown Library is hosting a series of events about the important relationship between journalism and history. Supporting excellent journalistic coverage of the events of 250 years ago, and exploring how historians and journalists work in parallel and often synergistic ways, this series is part of a project supported by Emerson Collective, and in partnership with The Atlantic.

The series begins with four online interviews in February 2026 with historians and journalists who think and work historically and journalistically. Over four events, Karin Wulf will be in conversation with Jamelle Bouie, a columnist for The New York Times; John Dickerson, a reporter and anchor most recently for CBS Evening News; Jennifer Scheussler, a reporter for The New York Times; and a panel of historians including Laurent Debois of Duke University, Nicole Hemmer of Vanderbilt University, and Martha Jones of Johns Hopkins University.

Please join us for a discussion of how to apply for research funding, within and beyond Brown. Professors Michael Satlow (Judaic Studies & Religious Studies) and Shanti Morell-Hart (Anthropology & JIAAW) will facilitate the discussion. There will also be an opportunity to talk to the CGA director about any plans you might have to apply to our own grants, either this time round (the deadline will be March 16) or in the future. All graduate students with an interest in the distant past are welcome.

Free lunch will be provided! 

About the Event

Recent developments in Iran have drawn intense global attention amid profound grief, anger, and ongoing state violence. Thousands of protesters have been killed, and the repercussions of repression continue to shape political life in Iran and across its diasporas. This teach-in brings together Narges Bajoghli, Ahmad Mohammadpour, and Sanam Vakil for a careful, historically grounded discussion of protest, repression, and representation.

The panel will examine internal political dynamics as well as how events in Iran are framed and contested by state actors, media, activists, and diasporic communities. Attentive to the human costs of violence, the conversation aims to provide context, analytical depth, and critical reflection on how knowledge about Iran is produced and circulated in moments of crisis.

This webinar is hosted by Nadje Al-Ali.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email Global_Antiquity@brown.edu.

Join us virtually on February 9, 2026 at 5 p.m. EST for a conversation between JCB Library Director Karin Wulf and Jamelle Bouie. Based in Charlottesville, Virginia, Jamelle Bouie is a columnist for The New York Times. He covers history and politics. In addition, he co-hosts the Unclear and Present Danger podcast on the political and military thrillers of the 1990s.

For 2026, the John Carter Brown Library is hosting a series of events titled Journalism and History When History Is News about the important relationship between journalism and history. Supporting excellent journalistic coverage of the events of 250 years ago, and exploring how historians and journalists work in parallel and often synergistic ways, this series is part of a project supported by the Emerson Collective, and in partnership with The Atlantic.

Register here: https://brown.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_F_OwjGiISpaMzxf1FyhfzQ.

About the series

Is journalism the “first rough draft of history?” Journalists and historians often work in tandem, serving as one another’s sources for primary research and background information. Sometimes the relationship is tense, with historians wishing for fuller context in reported news, and journalists likely wishing that historians better understood what it means to cover events as they’re unfolding. It’s much too simple, though, to say that historians stick in the past, and journalists in the present. Historians have always regularly worked looking forward, with a consciousness of development in their own time, and journalists regularly reach back to explain the right now in terms of what came before.

But what happens when history is the news? In 2026 both journalists and historians are covering the American Revolution, a sprawling cultural, military and political phenomenon. In short, we have much to share.

For 2026, the John Carter Brown Library is hosting a series of events about the important relationship between journalism and history. Supporting excellent journalistic coverage of the events of 250 years ago, and exploring how historians and journalists work in parallel and often synergistic ways, this series is part of a project supported by Emerson Collective, and in partnership with The Atlantic.

The series begins with four online interviews in February 2026 with historians and journalists who think and work historically and journalistically. Over four events, Karin Wulf will be in conversation with Jamelle Bouie, a columnist for The New York Times; John Dickerson, a reporter and anchor most recently for CBS Evening News; Jennifer Scheussler, a reporter for The New York Times; and a panel of historians including Laurent Debois of Duke University, Nicole Hemmer of Vanderbilt University, and Martha Jones of Johns Hopkins University.

When a process popularly known as the Industrial Revolution began in earnest in Germany during the middle of the nineteenth century, contemporaries were stunned by the scale and ferocity of the transformation. Although Germany had long been considered a promising place to industrialize, with historic ties to New World markets, a skilled and educated workforce, and deep pockets of wealth, progress had been slow due to persistent indifference and even skepticism across society. That people should have suddenly dropped their reservations and embraced the new industrial modernity defied all explanation, with some concluding that the Germans must have fallen under the spell of a “capitalist spirit.”

But what did they mean by this? In a new book titled The Migrant’s Spirit: How Industrial Modernity Came to the German Lands (Oxford University Press, 2025), Benjamin Hein argues that a crucial impetus for the observed changes derived from an intensifying cultural exchange with the country’s burgeoning diaspora in North America—one of the largest in this century. In correspondence and other “news from America,” emigrated Germans conveyed to those left behind a different set of norms and ethics regarding work, entrepreneurship, and commerce. In the process, they inadvertently mobilized wide swaths of the population for a more centralized regime of production designed to serve global market forces instead of local needs and corporatist imperatives.

Author Bio:

Benjamin P. Hein — Benjamin Hein is an Assistant Professor of History at Brown University. His research focuses on the circulation of ideas, people and goods across Europe and the North Atlantic World during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how these movements both shaped, and were shaped by, major events and developments in European history. Hein’s work has culminated in a book-length study: “The Migrant’s Spirit. How the Industrial Revolution Came to the German Lands” (Oxford University Press, 2025).

Speaker Bios:

Alison Frank Johnson — Alison Frank Johnson is Professor of History at Harvard University. She also chairs the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. She was previously Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2002 to 2005. She has held visiting fellowships at the Institute for Bavarian History at the LMU Munich and the Institute for Global History at the FU Berlin. She has published on the oil industry, alpine tourism, maritime power, and other issues related to European (and German) social and environmental history.

Mark Blyth — Mark Blyth is the William R. Rhodes ’57 Professor of International Economics and the Director of the Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance at Brown University. Blyth has appointments in the Watson School of International Studies and in the Department of Political Science. Blyth taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1997 until 2009. Blyth’s work falls into several related areas: the politics of ideas, how institutions change, macroeconomic regimes and growth models, and why people believe certain economic ideas despite buckets of evidence to the contrary.

*A reception will take place from 12-1PM after the book talk. Brown Bookstore will be on location before and after the event for those interested in purchasing a copy of the book.

*Registration is required to attend this event.

Presented by Darrin McMahon, Dartmouth College. 

This talk is part of the Spring 2026 Brown European History Workshop. Each talk will be moderated by Benjamin Hein and Tiraana Bains. 

Former Congresswoman and current Watson Senior Fellow Kathy Manning joins students for an in-depth look at how Congress operates in the lead-up to a high-stakes midterm cycle. She will be discussing the evolving dynamics within caucuses, the strategic calculations that shape legislative priorities during election years, and how constituent pressures and national narratives influence decision-making on Capitol Hill. Manning’s perspective will give students a grounded understanding of what’s at stake in 2026 and how congressional leadership, coalition building, and governance shift as campaigns ramp up.

This event is open to Brown Students only! 

On December 15th, we invite you to join us at the JCB for an informal workshop focused on our rich collections documenting Haitian history during the broad revolutionary period. We’ll begin with a presentation on the history and direction of the JCB’s Haitian collections from the JCB’s curator of maps and prints, Dr. Bertie Mandelblatt. The day includes lunch (catered by a local Haitian restaurant) and other presentations from leading scholars on objects from the JCB’s or other collections on these topics.

Please note that registration is required for this event due to space limitations.

CGA invites all graduate students interested in the ancient world to join us for our December Grad Forum: “Alt-Ac Careers”. We’ll be talking about alt-ac or para-academic careers: job opportunities in academia and related sectors other than becoming a professor. What opportunities are there, and how can you set yourself up for success? There will also be room to discuss non-academic career paths more broadly. We will be joined by two Brown colleagues who use their PhDs in ancient studies in different branches of academia: Sam Caldis (Associate Dean of the Faculty, 2019 PhD in Ancient History) and Micah Saxton (Humanities Librarian, 2013 PhD in Religious Studies). 

Join other graduate students across Brown as we all work on our own writing assignments - together. This can range from a weekly response post for seminars, to a dissertation chapter. Snacks and coffee will be provided by the Center for Global Antiquity. Sessions will include one silent hour and one social hour to accommodate different work styles and provide a chance to meet graduate students across the various departments connected to the Center for Global Antiquity.

Join for this special talk on Chinese History, presented by Professor Fei Huang, Professor of Chinese History and Society, Department of Chinese Studies, the University of Tübingen.

This is a zoom event. 

Please join us for “1825 - 2025: France, Haiti and the Question of Indebtedness” presented by Marlene Daut, Chelsea Stieber and Bertie Mandelblatt on Wednesday, December 3 at 5pm at the John Carter Brown Library, 94 George St. Please use the Caspersen Entrance! 

2025 marks the bicentennial of King Charles X’s 1825 Royal Ordinance demanding that Haiti pay 150 million gold francs to former French colonists and slaveholders in exchange for recognition of its independence, declared on January 1, 1804. As is well known, this punitive indemnity was made even more damaging by the massive loans Haiti had to take out from French banks to settle its so-called “debt,” effectively burdening the nation with a “double debt” which some observers on both sides of the Atlantic now refer to as the “ransom-debt” of independence. Despite a reduction by more than half in 1838, it took many decades to pay off the 112 million francs in indemnity, loans, and interests (i.e., the equivalent of nearly 560 million in today’s dollars). A recent New York Times investigation shows that Haiti ultimately paid the equivalent of between 22 billion and 110 billion US dollars. Although former French president François Hollande declared that reparations for Haiti were a non-starter, economist Thomas Piketty has recently made a compelling case that France owes “at least” 28 billion dollars to Haiti as reparations for France’s role in this crime against humanity. Profoundly shaping Haiti’s economic future, the indemnity of 1825 thus paved the way for two centuries of foreign interference and direct intervention in the country’s social and political life. Today, as we witness the unfolding of another U.N.-backed mission to restore “law and order” in Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas, this ruinous indemnity continues to condition the Haitian people’s experience of sovereignty and self-determination, both at home and in the diaspora.

ZOOM LINK

The Disability Studies Working Group at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities presented a conference and roundtable on Medieval and Early Modern disability, featuring Andrew Bozio (Skidmore College), Jonathan Hsy (George Washington University), Paul Michael Johnson (Johns Hopkins University), and Sonya Loftis (Morehouse College). Moderated by Alani Hicks-Bartlett (Brown University).

A reception followed the event.

Schedule

Speaker Abstracts and Bios

Andrew Bozio, “Settler Ability, c. 1600”

In “A Device made by the Earl of Essex for the Entertainment of the Queen,” an Indian prince travels from “the great river of the Amazons” to the English court. “Born blind,” the prince has been blessed with a prophecy that he should expel the Spanish from his native lands, but his blindness is understood by his father, the king, and, to a less obvious extent, “his people” as preventing him from realizing that destiny. After an ancient oracle explains that the prince will gain the power of sight if he can find “a Queen” who “reigns … in peace and honor true,” he sails to England in search of Elizabeth. Through this elaborate fiction, the “Device” reveals the ideology of ability at the heart of European imperialism. While the prince’s blindness functions as an obvious example of what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder call “narrative prosthesis,” in which disabilities “lend a ‘tangible’ body to textual abstractions,” I argue that the “Device” stages this fantasy of Indigenous impairment in order to cultivate a sense of what I call “settler ability.” Settler ability depends upon the racial fantasy that Indigenous peoples are inherently incapable and that their incapacity justifies — indeed, requires — the “curative violence” of settler colonial conquest. In this talk, I trace the history of this English capacity to cure through the Black Legend — the myth that the Spanish were uniquely cruel in their conquest of the Americas — before showing how the “Device” links settler ability to the “protocolonial desire” that, for Imtiaz Habib, provides the foundation for colonization itself.

Andrew Bozio is Associate Professor of English at Skidmore College. He is the author of Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage (Oxford University Press, 2020) and, with Penelope Geng, the co-editor of a special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies on “Disability and Racial Capitalism in the Early Modern Anglophone World” (forthcoming in 2026). His second monograph project, “Scenes of Dispossession: English Theater and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism,” traces the development of a racialized logics of dispossession across the early modern Anglophone world, arguing that, as theater translated those logics into a set of scripts, scenarios, and personae, it taught the English how racial capitalism could be lived in practice. His work has been supported by the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Henry E. Huntington Library, and the RaceB4Race Second Book Institute.

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Jonathan Hsy, “Crip Futures: Teresa de Cartagena, Deaf Culture, and a Global Middle Ages”

This talk explores how a deaf Iberian nun, Teresa de Cartagena, thought about deafness in her own time and place, and it considers how Deaf scholars and signing communities around the globe use this medieval author to explore contemporary issues of language, ethnicity, and cultural belonging. This medieval author, and her diverse modern-day audiences, offer us new ways to theorize crip time and disability history.

Jonathan Hsy is Professor of English at George Washington University, where he is affiliated faculty in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and the Sigur Center for Asian Studies. His work often asks how critical theory and cultural analysis reshape our understandings of language, identity, and disability (from the Middle Ages to the present). He is the author of Antiracist Medievalisms: From “Yellow Peril” to Black Lives Matter (Arc Humanities Press, 2021, now open access) and co-editor of A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages (Bloomsbury, 2020). He is a founding Executive Board Member of RaceB4Race and served on the MLA’s Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession. His talk at Brown draws upon his forthcoming book Disabled Storytellers in the Global Middle Ages: Craft and Community in the Medieval World (Cambridge University Press).

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Paul Michael Johnson, “Cervantes’ Castrato: An Aria of Early Modern Race and (Dis)ability”

This talk listens closely to the voice of Luis, an enslaved, Afro-descendant eunuch in Miguel de Cervantes’ novella El celoso extremeño. Through a practice I call creative auscultation, I interpret Luis strategically as a castrato in order to probe the complex intersections of race and disability in the Early Modern world. I suggest that Luis, as a disabled character with a nonetheless extraordinary vocal ability, productively challenges scholarly assumptions about racially marked and differently abled others.

Paul Michael Johnson is Associate Research Professor of Spanish at Johns Hopkins University. To date, his scholarship has drawn primarily on the history of emotion, the senses, the body, and performance as sites of racial and gendered othering in Early Modern literary culture. He is the author of Affective Geographies: Cervantes, Emotion, and the Literary Mediterranean (University of Toronto Press, 2021) and co-editor, with Nicholas R. Jones, of Cervantine Futures: Reading Cervantes After the Critical Turn (Vanderbilt University Press, forthcoming). His work has also appeared in such journals as Renaissance Quarterly, PMLA, Atlantic Studies, and Exemplaria. He currently serves on the advisory board of the New Hispanisms series at Louisiana State University Press and is the incoming editor of Cervantes: Journal of the Cervantes Society of America.

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Sonya Loftis, “Hamlet and Macbeth in Crip Time”

Recent theorists in disability studies have explored the connections between neurodivergence and time, positing that mental disability exists in what is known as “crip time”; many neurodivergent people experience and relate to time differently from neurotypical people. Indeed, this very sense of differing or disjointed time is fundamental to some neurodivergent experiences. In this talk, I’ll consider readings of both “Hamlet” and “Macbeth” through the lens of crip time. While “Hamlet” plumbs the unstable and variable nature of time in relation to grief, trauma, and disability, it explores (and then eventually rejects) the possibilities of crip time. Shakespeare constructs the play so that any reading of “Hamlet,” both of Hamlet’s actions and of the play’s events, inevitably depends on an agreed upon neurotypical judgement of time, a “normative” framework to which both audiences and the play’s mad protagonist must ultimately submit. Meanwhile, a reading of crip time in “Macbeth” offers a vision of neurotypicality’s potential fragility, porousness, and ultimately, impossibility.

Sonya Freeman Loftis is the M. Mitchell Chair of English at Morehouse College. Her work focuses on disability studies and Early Modern literature, with particular attention to neurodiversity, autistic culture, and accessibility. She is the author of five books, including Shakespeare and Disability Studies (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum (Indiana University Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in The Disability Studies Reader, Disability Studies Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, and Shakespeare Bulletin. She is the series editor for Edinburgh Critical Studies in Early Modern Literature and Disability (Edinburgh University Press), the disability studies editor for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (Oxford University Press), and the editor-in-chief of Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture.

Moderator

Alani Hicks-Bartlett is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, French and Francophone Studies, and Hispanic Studies at Brown University. She is affiliated with the Department of Italian Studies, the Center for Global Antiquity, the Program in Medieval Studies, the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World, and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. Her work in disability studies focuses on Medieval and Early Modern literature and critical disability studies theory. Some of her recent publications in critical disability studies and related fields have appeared in the Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes, Literatures of the Hundred Years War, ehumanista, L’Esprit Créateur, and MLN. She is one of the editors of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, an assistant editor of Quidditas, and one of the chairs of the Renaissance Studies Seminar at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center. Alongside Leon Hilton, she is co-convenor of the Disability Studies Working Group at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.

Presented by the Disability Studies Working Group at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.

Image: From “A verger’s dream: Saints Cosmas and Damian performing a miraculous cure by transplantation of a leg,” oil painting attributed to the Master of Los Balbases, ca. 1495

No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others, how we organize our politics. Sven Beckert, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Empire of Cotton, places the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework, tracing its history during the past millennium and across the world. An epic achievement, his book takes us into merchant businesses in Aden and car factories in Turin, onto the terrifyingly violent sugar plantations in Barbados, and within the world of women workers in textile factories in today’s Cambodia.

Capitalism, argues Beckert, was born global. Emerging from trading communities across Asia, Africa, and Europe, capitalism’s radical recasting of economic life rooted itself only gradually. But then it burst onto the world scene, as a powerful alliance between European states and merchants propelled them, and their economic logic, across the oceans. This, Beckert shows, was modern capitalism’s big bang, and one of its epicenters was the slave labor camps of the Caribbean. This system, with its hierarchies that haunt us still, provided the liftoff for the radical transformations of the Industrial Revolution. Fueled by vast productivity increases along with coal and oil, capitalism pulled down old ways of life to crown itself the defining force of the modern world. This epic drama, shaped by state-backed institutions and imperial expansion, corresponded at no point to an idealized dream of free markets.

Drawing on archives on six continents, Capitalism locates important modes of agency, resistance, innovation, and ruthless coercion everywhere in the world, opening the aperture from heads of state to rural cultivators. Beckert shows that despite the dependence on expansion, there always have been, and are still, areas of human life that the capitalist revolution has yet to reach.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The story of the long fight for freedom of African captives rescued from the illegal slave trade only to be forced back into bondage

SEE PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT

“The Bonds of Freedom” tells the forgotten story of people seized from slave ships by maritime patrols, “liberated,” then forced into bonded labor between 1807 and 1880. Using extensive archival research from Sierra Leone, South Africa, Brazil, Cuba, the United Kingdom, and the United States, historian Jake Subryan Richards uncovers the contrasting ideas and practices of authoritarianism and freedom that empires and liberated Africans developed during the protracted end of the illegal slave trade.

Jake Subryan Richards is assistant professor of international history at the London School of Economics. He is a historian of the Atlantic world and global history, with interests in legal history, the history of empires, and the African diaspora. Richards has published articles in Past and Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and Modern Intellectual History. He co-curated the exhibition “Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance” at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (2023-24) and coedited the accompanying catalogue.

Moderated by Michael P. Steinberg, Barnaby Conrad and Mary Critchfield Keeney Professor of History and Music, Professor of German Studies.

Lunch provided with registration.

Beyond coursework, how can undergraduates at Brown University advance their research training in the humanities and position themselves for graduate work and humanities careers? Attendees joined us for a panel of faculty and honors students that discussed humanities research opportunities.

The panel was followed by a Q&A and a reception, which gave attendees the opportunity to build their research network.

Speakers

• Amanda Anderson | Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English, Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities
• Ethan Pollock | Dean of the College, Abbott Gleason University Professor of History, Professor of Slavic Studies
• Lindsay Caplan | Andrea V. Rosenthal Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture
• Indigo Mudbhary | 2025–26 Cogut Institute Undergraduate Fellow, concentrating in Ethnic Studies and History
• Talia Sherman | 2025–26 Cogut Institute Undergraduate Fellow, concentrating in English and Linguistics

The event was sponsored by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and the Brown Research Club, a student organization aimed at cultivating a community of engaged scholars through research accessibility initiatives such as introducing students to research opportunities.

What do religious authorities have to say about artificial intelligence? How do religious communities engage with AI technology and infrastructure? What aspects of religious belief and practice are reflected in AI? Panelists considered these and other questions from various period, disciplinary, and religious perspectives.

Panelists

• Montagu James (History | Brown University)
• Sonam Kachru (Religious Studies | Yale University)
• Adi M. Ophir (Humanities, Middle East Studies | Brown University)
• Kera Street (Religious Studies | Brown University)

This event was part of the second year of programming of the Collaborative Humanities Lab “ Models-Scale-Context: AI and the Humanities ” at the Cogut Institute, led by Holly Case and Suresh Venkatasubramanian. The event was sponsored in part by the Center for Technological Responsibility, Re-imagination, and Redesign (CNTR).

Images: fresco inside the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls; 15th-century manuscript painting of the giant ‘Uj; 14th-century manuscript painting showing the preparation of the Passover lamb and the marking of the door; Buddhist mural art in Nepal, photo by Vyacheslav Argenberg

About the Event

How does an agrarian province become an oil frontier? This talk explores that question by explaining how the acceleration of oil extraction in mid-twentieth-century Iraq provoked distinct forms of struggle over land in the date plantations of Basra province. Drawing on Iraqi state archives, rural labor contracts and multinational business records, Gabriel Young will show how oil company officials, absentee landholders and tenant-cultivators asserted different notions of property and belonging amidst a wider transition from agrarian to extractive capitalism. The case of Basra points toward an alternative account of hydrocarbon extraction in the modern Middle East whereby oil appears to expand rather than diminish postcolonial state power.

About the Speaker

Gabriel Young is a social historian of twentieth-century Iraq and the Persian Gulf with a research and teaching focus on state formation, agrarian change and resource extraction. His book project explores the relationship between natural resource sovereignty and political rule from the perspective of communities living along the resource frontier of Basra in southern Iraq. Young’s work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Labor and Working-Class History and Jadaliyya.

Young joins the Center for Middle East Studies in Fall 2025 as the Alomran Family Postdoctoral Research Associate in Middle East Studies.

For accommodations contact cmes@brown.edu.

Where to meet your Guide?

The Tour will begin across the street from the Ruth J. Simmons Center ( 94 Waterman Street) in the red area marked in the image below. There will also be a walkway sign in that area to indicate where your tour guide will meet you.

Parking information

College Hill visitors may find parking in Lot 68 Upper, also called the Power Street Parking Garage, located at 111 Power Street. The entrance to the garage is located at the intersection of Power and Thayer Streets. The Lot 68 Upper garage contains two pay stations, which are located at the front and rear of the garage. Please locate an empty parking space, purchase your visitor parking permit via one of the pay stations and place your receipt permit on your vehicle dashboard.

• Mon - Fri, 8:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. $3.00/hour

• All Day Rate until 6:00 p.m. (Monday - Friday) $15.00

If Brown University visitor parking is unavailable, visitors may find metered parking on the streets in and around campus. Parking meters in Providence do not accept cash or credit cards, payment is made using the Passport parking application. The Passport Parking App allows you to conveniently pay for parking from anywhere using your mobile device.

Private Tour Requests

If you would like to request a tour for a campus or community group at a different time, requests for private group tours can be submitted using this form. We ask that all requests are made at least two weeks in advance in order for our team to properly manage the logistics.
Note: The Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice is open Monday–Friday from 8 AM–4 PM, so our tours typically only take place within our operating hours.

Join other graduate students across Brown as we all work on our own writing assignments - together. This can range from a weekly response post for seminars, to a dissertation chapter. Snacks and coffee will be provided by the Center for Global Antiquity. Sessions will include one silent hour and one social hour to accommodate different work styles and provide a chance to meet graduate students across the various departments connected to the Center for Global Antiquity.

Join the Department of History for a conversation with Karin Wulf and Leslie M. Harris (Northwestern University) on Wulf’s latest publication, Lineage: Genealogy and the Politics of Connection in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2025). Those who are interested in purchasing a copy of the book will have an opportunity to do so during pre-sale at 3:45PM (before the talk) and again at 5PM (book sale and signing). 

About the author: Karin Wulf is the Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library and Professor of History at Brown University. Wulf is a historian of gender, family and politics in eighteenth-century British America. 

About the speaker: Leslie M. Harris, Professor of History at Northwestern University, has ongoing research interests in the history of slavery, gender and sexuality in the antebellum U.S. south; and the historiography of U.S. slavery.

Join the Simmons Center for a virtual Public Humanities Lunch Talk with Marian Carpenter, Senior Director of Museum Collections at the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

With the historical erasure of underrepresented groups from government and educational platforms; the removal and censoring of historical documentation, exhibitions and interpretation; the defunding of historical/cultural organizations, archives and museums; and the elimination of jobs in the history and museum fields, it is imperative for public historians to challenge these actions. The time is NOW! As a public historian, Marian Carpenter will share important highlights during her career of defending cultural representation, challenging interpretation of racial sensitive collections, and encountering unfair work practices.

To inspire emerging public historians to strategically advocate for changes, Carpenter will discuss her efforts to support self-care practices when working with racially sensitive collections and to provide cultural lessons of empowerment in community engagement. Attendees will also learn how the relevancy of historic preservation impacts the future work of public historians to be inclusive in methodology and interpretation.

Moderated by Public Humanities MA Student Ray Zhang ’26.

The Public Humanities Tuesday Lunch Talk Series brings artists, curators, educators, activists, writers, community organizers and thinkers together to highlight emergent themes in the public humanities. In concert with the Simmons Center’s MA program in Public Humanities, it considers core themes ranging from decoloniality to resistance, cultural preservation to highlighting new modes of commemoration, redistribution, and justice.

About the Speaker

Marian Carpenter is the John & Neville Bryan Senior Director of Museum Collections for the Historic Sites Division at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. She has experience in heritage preservation with emphasis in collections management, exhibitions, curation, community engagement, and interpretative programming. Carpenter has worked in various museums including the Ringing Museum of Art, the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibitions Service. She holds a B.A. in American history from Indiana University and a M.A in American history with a concentration in African American history from the University of Cincinnati.

This event is part of the Department of Anthropology’s Fall 2025 Colloquium Series

This talk considers the theoretical potential of the plantationocene when viewed from the perspective of Dominica’s historical archaeology. Coined just over a decade ago, the term ‘plantationocene’ was an attempt to characterize more precisely the devastating transformation of diverse ecologies into enclosed plantations that relied on coerced labor. Despite the compelling premise of the concept, it has been criticized for advancing a view of the plantation that obscures the racialization of power and the laboring class’s socio-economic response. Drawing on archival and archaeological research, this talk narrates the formation of the plantationocene on Dominica and elaborates on the network of objects, people, and ideas that the working agricultural class mobilized in response.

About the Speaker: Khadene Harris is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology also appointed to the Center for African and African American Studies at Rice University. An historical archaeologist, her research explores how race, labor, and capitalism intersect in the colonial Caribbean. Her current project focuses on the transition from slavery to freedom on the island of Dominica, looking at how the laboring class mobilized social and economic networks in the face of ongoing dispossession. Her research uses imported and locally made ceramics, the house and yard complex, and oral accounts to narrate community histories under colonial rule.

The 46th Annual NE/SAH Student Symposium will take place at Brown.

The Student Symposium features presentations by outstanding students from programs across New England in the history, theory, and criticism of architecture, art history, urban studies, historic preservation, and related fields. Light refreshments will be provided and a Q&A with the audience will follow each of the two sessions, outlined below.

Session 1: Landscape, Territory, and Regions

Session 2: Interiority, Domesticity, and External Projections

In person space is limited - register today!

About the Event

Every year, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi, Jordanian and Palestinian students sit for exams, marking the end of their secondary education. Scores shape futures, determine whether a student is university-bound and what subject they can study; a top score can bring celebration and even minor celebrity status. This talk by Hilary Falb Kalisman traces the history of standardized testing in Britain’s Middle Eastern Mandates into the first few decades of the post-Mandate era. The high-stakes, content-based written exams introduced during the 1920s played an uneasy role in the political and educational landscape of the 1950s-1970s. Policymakers in the newly independent states of Jordan, Iraq, and Israel linked examinations with modernization, a means of quantifying national progress and bringing their countries up to standards of international development, while simultaneously excluding specific populations from exams’ benefits. Without an independent Palestinian state, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which was responsible for Palestinian education, reluctantly increased the importance and prevalence of standardized tests.

Meanwhile, the region’s populations associated matriculation or baccalaureate examinations with promises of social mobility, merit and objectivity. Yet American aid, through its Point Four program and later USAID, required these new states to invest in vocational education and move away from the general academic exams of the Mandate era. Countries across the region sought American funds, in line with a global discourse of development, planning and an economically productive social hierarchy. However, when experts suggested that UNRWA, for example, spend more time on handicrafts training and less on rote memorization for standardized tests, students’ parents protested, angered that their children were being denied the promise of university education and social mobility. Sustained popular as well as governmental support for standardized tests has led to their persistence into the present, despite opposition from American and American-trained experts. This talk will consider the implications of this persistence, in which standardized tests offer an ideal of objectivity and equality in contexts of nepotism, corruption and vast socio-economic disparity.

About the Speaker

Hilary Falb Kalisman is an associate professor of history and endowed professor of Israel/Palestine studies in the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research interests include education, standardization, colonialism, state and nation building in Iraq, Israel, Jordan and Palestine. Her first book, “Teachers as State-Builders: Education and the Making of the Modern Middle East” received the annual History of Education Society Outstanding Book Award in 2023. She is currently writing a political and social history of standardized testing in the Middle East.

The conditions that laid the groundwork for the Age of Revolution in Europe and the Americas were also part of the lived experience in West Africa and other parts of the Atlantic world. Yet, the voices of the non-literate African men and women who debated, theorized, and acted out their critique of imperial hegemony, resisted arbitrary power, led revolts, imagined new political configurations, and contested slavery during this period are largely absent in the historiography. Is it that these so-called “natives” do not and cannot think about alternatives to slavery, merchant capitalism, and empire, or that our historical methods have been ill-equipped to “read” and understand the “natives’” thoughts and praxis? Using material and Orisa archives, I discuss new sources and approaches for recognizing Yoruba intellectual agents in West Africa, how the grievances of these agents against the Oyo Empire shaped their ideas and actions, and the insights we gain when the thoughts and praxis of these agents are included in the intellectual history of the Age of Revolution.

About the Speaker

Akin Ogundiran is broadly interested in the archaeology and history of Africa over the past 2,500 years, with emphasis on the Yoruba world (West Africa). His earlier research efforts sought to understand the impacts of global/regional political economies on community formations and how social actors created knowledge, communities, and identities with objects and the landscape. Ogundiran’s current research intersects cultural, political economy, and environmental approaches to study the history of complex social systems at different scales—e.g., household, urbanism, and empire. His ongoing field projects are in three parts: the archaeology and history of an Early Iron Age community formation (400 BC-100 AD); the political economy and social ecology of the Oyo Empire (1570-1830); and the landscape history of the Osun-Osogbo Grove—a UNESCO World Heritage Site (ca. 1590 to the present), all in southwest Nigeria. His methodology is eclectic, ranging from archaeology, orality, and ritual archives to geosciences, landscape studies, language, performance, material life, and documentary sources. He is also interested in the cultural history of the Black Atlantic. Ogundiran directs the Material History Lab in the Department of History.

About the Lecture Series

The Annual Church Lecture in the Department of History is given in honor of William F. Church, a Professor of History at Brown University for thirty years until his death in 1977.

William F. Church was one of America’s foremost scholars of early modern Europe and one of the most highly regarded professors at Brown. Particularly known for his work in the history of political thought, his books include Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth-Century France, Richelieu and Reason of State, and Louis XIV in Historical Thought.

The Church Lecture brings to Brown a distinguished scholar in early modern history. Colleagues and students from Brown’s History department as well as specialists in early modern studies from around the campus and New England come together for an evening lecture and reception in honor of Professor Church.

“What the University Should Know about K-12 Education”

with

Noliwe Rooks, Chair and Professor, Africana Studies/Rites and Reason Theatre, L. Herbert Ballou University Professor

Jason Okonofua, Associate Professor of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences, Annenberg Institute

The discussion is the seventh in the series “University in the Middle–Past and Present.” The series explores past and present instances of universities at the focus of attention. How has the university fared under similar conditions in different contexts around the world and across time? Where are universities currently at the nexus of events, how did they come to be there, and what have been the effects on the lives and work of faculty and students, the aims and substance of scholarship, and the role and place of the university in society?

CGA invites all graduate students interested in global antiquity to join us for our next Grad Forum: “How to Make the Most of a Conference”. Professors John Steele (E&A) and Susan Harvey (Religious Studies) will serve as panelists for this session.

Should you be attending conferences? Should you be speaking at conferences? When, and how? And how do you make the most of it once you’re there? This informal workshop is for all graduate students whose research relates to the ancient world. No registration required.

You’re invited to join us for an in-depth conversation between Joseph Lee, Aquinnah Wampanoag journalist and author of Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity, and Bathsheba Demuth, Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society and Faculty Director of NAISI.

In this discussion, Lee delves into his memoir, which intertwines personal narrative with a critical examination of Indigenous identity, sovereignty, and community resilience. Weaving together his own experiences and those of Indigenous communities around the world, Lee situates his own story within a broader, global context, exploring Indigenous struggles and triumphs from the icy tundra of Alaska to the forests of Northern California and the halls of the United Nations.

This event is free and open to the public.

About the Author:

Joseph Lee is an Aquinnah Wampanoag writer based in New York City. He has an MFA from Columbia University and teaches creative writing at Mercy University. His writing has been published in The Guardian, BuzzFeed, Vox, High Country News, and more. He was a Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers Workshop and a Senior Indigenous Affairs Fellow at Grist.

Navyug Gill is Associate Professor of History at William Paterson University.

One of the most durable figures in modern history, the peasant has long been a site of intense intellectual and political debate. Yet underlying much of this literature is the assumption that peasants simply existed everywhere, a general if not generic group, traced backward from modernity to antiquity. Focused on the transformation of Panjab during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book accounts for the colonial origins of global capitalism through a radical history of the concept of “the peasant,” demonstrating how seemingly fixed hierarchies were in fact produced, legitimized, and challenged within the preeminent agricultural region of South Asia. Navyug Gill uncovers how and why British officials and ascendant Panjabis disrupted existing forms of identity and occupation to generate a new agrarian order in the countryside. The notion of the hereditary caste peasant engaged in timeless cultivation thus emerged, paradoxically, as a result of a dramatic series of conceptual, juridical, and monetary divisions.

Far from archaic relics, this book ultimately reveals both the landowning peasant and landless laborer to be novel political subjects forged through the encounter between colonialism and struggles over culture and capital within Panjabi society. Questions of progress, exploitation and knowledge come to animate the vernacular operations of power. With this history, Gill brings difference and contingency to understandings of the global past in order to re-think the itinerary of comparative political economy as well as alternative possibilities for emancipatory futures.

The Department of Classics cordially invites you to attend the Charles Alexander Robinson Jr. Memorial Lecture. “Dominating the Roman Maritime Economy: Slaves as Wealthy Entrepreneurs” will be presented by Edward E. Cohen, Professor of Classics and Ancient History (Adjunct), the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Cohen’s presentation will be tripartite:

First –– an overview of the aspects of maritime commerce, maritime finance and maritime law that during the Principate at Rome allowed some enslaved Romans to function, and to flourish, among the key entrepreneurs (exercitores) upon whom sea trade was dependent,

Second –– the nature of the business undertaken by these exercitores, including case studies focusing on Cato and Trimalchio (of the Satyricon),

Third –– the mechanisms, especially the pursuit of utilitas (“juridical pragmatism”) through which Roman law facilitated maritime commerce and its dominance by slaves (and their [sometimes] free subordinates) –– in defiance of purported fundamental principles of Roman law.

Edward E. Cohen is Professor of Classics and Ancient History (Adjunct) at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in the economic and legal history of ancient Greece and Rome and is the author of many books and articles on this subject, including most recently Roman Inequality (Oxford University Press 2023).

Offering a glimpse into a new collaborative project on letterlocking from Ottoman Tunis in the early nineteenth century, this talk will reconstruct the intricate folds, tucks, and slits of letter packets secured shut with “letterlocking,” a practice that underpinned global communications security for centuries before modern envelopes.

Free and open to the public. In-person event.

The speaker Jana Dambrogio has pioneered the study of letterlocking using automated virtual unfolding of sealed documents imaged by X-ray microtomography and computational flattening algorithms. She has co-authored numerous studies on the subject with Daniel Starza Smith, including their latest book from MIT Press entitled, Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter. Dambrogio situates her findings from this case study of Ottoman Tunisian correspondence within a novel letterlocking categorization system based on a study of 250,000 historical letters.

This event will delve into how the materiality of the paper lock itself acted as an antiforgery mechanism in the perilous waters of the Barbary Coast during the early period of diplomacy between the Ottoman regency of Tunis and the United States in the Mediterranean Sea. This session will be in conversation with Gwendolyn Collaço, Anne S.K. Brown Curator for Military & Society at the John Hay Library, who translated the 1817 letter from the Bey of Tunis to American President James Monroe (1817–1825) that Dambrogio analyzes in her work. In their dialogue, they will contextualize the unusual episode surrounding the dispatch of this letter, including American mercantile interests in the region, the response of the Bey of Tunis to violated ceremonial customs, and this dynamic period that transformed diplomatic correspondence between Tunis and its Mediterranean partners. This session features a hands-on demo of letterlocking techniques for audience members to try for themselves. 

Jana Dambrogio is the Thomas F. Peterson (1957) Conservator, Wunsch Conservation Laboratory, MIT Libraries. She is also the Director and Founder of Unlocking History Research Group, General Editor of Letterlocking.org and Dictionary of Letterlocking (DoLL).

This event forms part of CMES Research Initiative: American-Islamic Exchanges in the Long 19th Century.

In this talk and conversation, scholar and filmmaker Celine Parreñas Shimizu (University of California, Los Angeles) reflected on her work within the broad field of Ethnic Studies and the urgency of scholarship around Asian American representations.

“How do we understand deriving pleasure from rehearsing one’s own subjugation?” writes Shimizu. “My work on representations of intimacy at sites of inequality — both self-representations and fantasy-representations constructed by others — examines how race intersects with the most intimate power dynamics. Shaped by women of color feminist theory and literature, I have explored what it means to occupy the abjected position — the dehumanized relegation into ‘trash’ within social hierarchies.

“I came into Ethnic Studies seeking self-centrality in a world designed around my subordination, and the discipline provided tools to understand how race intersects with class, sex, gender, and the architecture of the public and private. From the margins emerges knowledge that dominant epistemologies exclude to maintain authority. The abject of Asian American Studies lies not in marginalized subjects themselves, but in forms of knowledge produced from the very positions that society renders ineligible and unrecognizable.”

The conversation was jointly moderated by Shelley Lee (American Studies, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, History | Brown University) with Gina Pérez (Comparative American Studies | Oberlin College).

About the Speakers

Celine Parreñas Shimizu is Dean of Theater, Film, and Television and Distinguished Professor of Film, Television, and Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her books include The Movies of Racial Childhoods: Screening Self-Sovereignty in Asian/America (Duke University Press, 2024), The Proximity of Other Skins: Ethical Intimacy in Global Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2020), Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies (Stanford University Press, 2012), and The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene (Duke University Press, 2007), which won the book award in cultural studies from the Association for Asian American Studies. Her writing has appeared in journals in cinema, performance, ethnic, feminist, and sexuality studies and transnational popular culture. Distributed by Women Make Movies, her films The Celine Archive (2020) and 80 Years Later: On Japanese American Racial Inheritance (2022) each won several festival awards. Her latest film, So to Speak (2025), is on the festival circuit. She received her Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, which inducted her into its Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame in 2023; her MFA in Film Directing and Production from the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television; and her B.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Shelley Lee is W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of American Studies, History, and Humanities and an affiliate of Urban Studies. Her scholarship focuses on Asian American history, immigration, race relations, and American cities in 20th-century America. Before joining Brown University in 2022, she served as Professor and Chair of Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College. She is the author of several books, including Koreatown, Los Angeles: Race, Immigration, and the “American Dream” (Stanford University Press, 2022), A New History of Asian America (Routledge, 2013), and Claiming the Oriental Gateway: Prewar Seattle and Japanese America (Temple University Press, 2011). Her work has been featured in journals such as Frontiers, Journal of Asian American Studies, and Western Historical Quarterly, as well as in outlets like Ms. Magazine and Salon. She is currently a faculty fellow at the Cogut Institute and is working on a new book project, “Out of Status,” a history of “unauthorized” immigration in the United States from the 19th-century to the present that focuses on Asian migrants and serves as a critical meditation on the role of immigration bureaucracy in American life and global geopolitics.

Gina Pérez is Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College. She is the author of two award-winning books: The Near Northwest Side Story: Gender, Migration and Puerto Rican Families (University of California Press, 2004) and Citizen, Student, Soldier: Latina/o Youth, JROTC, and the American Dream (New York University Press, 2015). She is also the coeditor of two anthologies: Beyond el Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America (New York University Press, 2010; with Frank Guridy and Adrian Burgos, Jr.) and Ethnographic Refusals, Unruly Latinidades (University of New Mexico Press, School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Series, 2022; with Alex Chávez). Her new book, Sanctuary People: Faith-Based Organizing in Latina/o Communities (New York University Press, 2024) explores how faith communities, local activists, and service providers in Ohio drew on the language and practice of sanctuary to characterize their responses to what felt like unrelenting instances of family separation, displacement, and increased economic and social vulnerability due to immigrant detention, (un)natural disasters, and economic and political crises within Latina/o communities from 2016–2020.

This event was the first of a new initiative on the “Origins and Afterlives of Ethnic Studies” directed by Shelley Lee (American Studies, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and History).

Help preserve Providence history! Join the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World and the staff of Providence’s North Burial Ground for a community data collection day within the cemetery’s old Colonial sections. Founded in 1700, North Burial Ground predates the founding of the United States and the charter of the City of Providence. Help the North Burial Ground Documentation Project (NBG-DP), led by Dr. Jordi Rivera Prince and City Cemetery Director Annalisa Heppner, and document the oldest tombstones at NBG to aid in research about Providence’s history and future preservation decisions. You will also learn about the cemetery’s history and many of the stories within it. Free and open to the public, and all ages are welcome. Please bring a pencil and a writing surface, though a limited number of clipboards and pencils will be available at the event.

Location: North Burial Ground, Rochambeau Entrance. Free parking on Main Street, or take the R bus line.

Contact: jiaaw@brown.edu or (401) 863-3188.

This event is part of Brown University’s Family Weekend 2025

Students and parents alike are often surprised to learn that a History concentration can lead to careers in medicine, law, politics, public policy, finance, and entrepreneurship.

At this brunch event, we welcome three distinguished graduates to discuss their pathways from the History concentration into diverse and rewarding careers.

*Refreshments will be served prior to the event in the Chair’s Office*

Alumni Speakers:

Sam Adler-Bell ’12 studied American history at Brown — focusing on 20th century social movements — and spent most of his time organizing protests and getting kicked out of university buildings. After graduating in December 2012, he embarked on a career in opinion journalism, writing for outlets like The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic, and the New York Times. In 2019, he began co-hosting a podcast about the American right called “Know Your Enemy,” which has since become a full-time gig. He continues to write a monthly column for New York magazine and contribute book reviews to various outlets.

Dr. Rachael Bedard ’05 is a writer and physician specializing in internal medicine, geriatrics, and palliative care. From 2016 to 2022 she worked for Correctional Health Services, the public agency that provides medical care in the New York City jail system. Dr. Bedard currently cares for homeless New Yorkers at Woodhull Hospital’s Safety Net Clinic in Brooklyn. She writes about medicine, politics and the criminal justice system. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Magazine and elsewhere. 

Rebecca Qiu ’22 is a 3L student at Harvard Law School. She spent her past summer in Washington, DC as a summer associate at Debevoise & Plimpton and subsequently at Boies Schiller Flexner. Before that, she was at the California Department of Justice working as a law clerk in the Civil Rights and Police Practices Sections. After graduation, she’ll be returning to DC to begin as a full-time associate at Debevoise. Rebecca graduated from Brown in 2022 concentrating in History. She wrote her history honors thesis on the experiences of Boston street musicians and regulation of the urban soundscape during the Progressive Era in relation to production of cultural stratification and urban regulations rooted in ideas of class. After Brown, she also completed an MPhil at the University of Cambridge in Economic and Social History.

Starting in the 1930s and up to the mid-1970s, a unique archive of oral histories was created in Greece bringing together testimonies on life in late Ottoman Turkey by ordinary Ottoman Greek refugees. In this talk, cultural historian Artemis Papatheodorou focuses on narrations about life among antiquities. What do these stories tell us about the reception of the material remains of the past by ordinary people? Given that the narrators were refugees, how did collective trauma affect their antiquities-related memories? Finally, how can we nowadays use these testimonies to reinterpret archaeological photography from the late Ottoman period?

Free and open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.

About the Speaker

Artemis Papatheodorou is a cultural historian specializing in the history of archaeology, provenance research, and the reception of the past in the Ottoman and Mediterranean long 19th century. She is currently a Marie Sklodowska Curie Global Fellow at Columbia University investigating the Mediterranean archaeological legislations between 1789 and 1945. She has a DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford. She has taught history at the American University of Sharjah (UAE) and Panteion University (Greece), and has been awarded postdoctoral fellowships, including at Harvard University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is a coeditor of the Bulletin of the History of Archaeology.

This lecture is presented as part of the collaborative humanities seminar “Trace and Absence: Comparative Perspectives on the Past in Things” and convened by Jeffrey Moser (History of Art and Architecture) and Felipe Rojas Silva (Archaeology and the Ancient World, Egyptology and Assyriology).

Keisha Blain Book Talk- “Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights”

Human Rights Book Talk

Join us for a conversation with acclaimed historian and Brown University Professor Keisha N. Blain on her new book, Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights. The conversation will be moderated by Kim Janey, the former Mayor of Boston and CEO of Economic Mobility Pathways.

About the Book:

Even before they were recognized as citizens of the United States, Black women understood that the fights for civil and human rights were inseparable. Over the course of two hundred years, they were at the forefront of national and international movements for social change, weaving connections between their own and others’ freedom struggles around the world.

Without Fear tells how, during American history, Black women made humans rights theirs: from worldwide travel and public advocacy in the global Black press to their work for the United Nations, they courageously and effectively moved human rights beyond an esoteric concept to an active, organizing principle. Acclaimed historian Keisha N. Blain tells the story of these women—from the well-known, like Ida B. Wells, Madam C. J. Walker, and Lena Horne, to those who are still less known, including Pearl Sherrod, Aretha McKinley, and Marguerite Cartwright. Blain captures human rights thinking and activism from the ground up with Black women at the center, working outside the traditional halls of power.

By shouldering intersecting forms of oppression—including racism, sexism, and classism—Black women have long been in a unique position to fight for freedom and dignity. Without Fear is an account of their aspirations, strategies, and struggles to pioneer a human rights approach to combating systems of injustice.

About the Author:

Keisha N. Blain is professor of Africana Studies and history at Brown University. She is a Guggenheim, Carnegie, and New America Fellow and a New York Times bestselling author. She has published eight books, including the multi-prize-winning book Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (2018); and the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America (2021). Her latest book, Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights (W.W. Norton, 2025), offers a sweeping history of human rights framed by the work and ideas of Black women in the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present. 

About the Moderator:

Kim Michelle Janey made history when she was sworn in as Boston’s first woman and first Black mayor, successfully leading the city through a multitude of unprecedented challenges, including the COVID-19 global pandemic. A highly respected public servant and non-profit leader, Ms. Janey has 30 years of experience in community organizing, advocacy, policy development, campaigns, and coalition building. Ms. Janey now leads Economic Mobility Pathways (EMPath), a national non-profit working to help people experiencing deep poverty climb the economic ladder. Under her leadership, EMPath has emerged as a more focused, resilient, and strategically aligned organization, driving long-term impact for families experiencing poverty.

Before joining EMPath, Ms. Janey served as a Spring 2022 Resident Fellow at the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School where she designed and led a study group entitled Racial Justice and Recovery: Leading American Cities to a More Equitable Future. She also served as Inaugural Fellow at the Berry Institute of Politics at Salem State University and as a Menschel Senior Leadership Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Most recently, Janey was named as a 2023 Aspen Institute Ascend Fellow where she and her cohort are working to advance the prosperity and well-being of children and families all across the United States.

Event details

The John Carter Brown Library is pleased to announce that it will host Dr. Colleen J. Shogan, 11th Archivist of the United States and the first woman in American history appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate to lead the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

This hybrid (in-person and Zoom) event will take place at 5 p.m. on Friday, October 10, 2025.

All are welcome!

Bio

Dr. Colleen J. Shogan served as the 11th Archivist of the United States, the first woman in American history appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate to lead the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). A noted author and political scientist, Colleen is deeply committed to civics education and prioritized sharing the records of the National Archives to a wider audience. Under her leadership, NARA launched numerous strategic initiatives to enhance services and make its holdings more accessible, both in-person and online, with the goal of cultivating public participation and strengthening our nation’s democracy.

Prior to becoming Archivist, Colleen served in several cultural heritage leadership roles. She was Senior Vice President and Director of the David M. Rubenstein Center at the White House Historical Association, worked in the United States Senate, and served as a senior executive at the Library of Congress and its Congressional Research Service. She was the Vice Chair of the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission and the Chair of the Board of Directors at the Women’s Suffrage National Monument Foundation.

A native of the Pittsburgh area, she holds a B.A. in Political Science from Boston College and a Ph.D. in American Politics from Yale University, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. Colleen is the 2024 recipient of the American Political Science Association’s Hubert Humphrey Award for outstanding public service.

Colleen is currently a senior advisor at More Perfect, an alliance of 37 presidential centers and hundreds of civic leaders and organizations, that invites Americans to consider the most enduring lessons of our history while informing the future of our democracy. She is also a Senior Fellow in Civics Education at Stand Together and an Adjunct Professor of Government at Georgetown University.

In her spare time, Colleen has published eight mystery novels in her award-winning Washington Whodunit series featuring amateur sleuth Kit Marshall. Stabbing in the Senate, her debut novel, received the Next Generation Indie Book Award gold medal in 2016. Larceny at the Library won the 2021 bronze medal for mystery at the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYs).

“We are living through an unprecedented historical moment. The world order established and enforced by the victors in WWII has come to an end. A new world order is yet to be consolidated.”

Legal historian Samuel Moyn (Yale University) and political economist Mark Blyth (Brown University) engaged in a debate intended to lay down, assess, and problematize the stakes implied in the above statement. The debate was moderated by Timothy Bewes (Brown University).

This debate, along with a second in the spring, is part of the Political Concepts initiative and this year will take the place of its annual conference.

This new format is intended to bring to light both common grounds and differences of discipline, methodological approach, and political/existential perspectives, and to facilitate reflection upon these in a way that will be accessible to a wider audience. We envision these debates as conversational in nature, conducted respectfully, with commitment to truth, logic, dialogue, inquiry, mutual understanding, and openness to persuasion.

The event consisted of 90 minutes of moderated debate and Q&A followed by refreshments and an open conversation with the public.

About the Speakers

Mark Blyth is the William R. Rhodes ’57 Professor of International Economics and the Director of the Rhodes Centre for International Economics and Finance at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Political Science. He is the author many award-winning books including Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford University Press, 2015), Angrynomics (Columbia University Press, 2020), Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation (Oxford University Press, 2022), and, forthcoming in 2025, Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers.

Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, where he also serves as Head of Grace Hopper College. His most recent book is Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), based on the Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought at the University of Oxford. His other books include The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press, 2012), Christian Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Harvard University Press, 2019), and Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021). He has written in venues such as The Atlantic, Boston Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonweal, Dissent, The Guardian, London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He is a fellow of the new Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

The event was presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and convened by Timothy Bewes, Ainsley LeSure, Brian Meeks, Adi Ophir, and Vazira Zamindar.

Where to meet your Guide?

The Tour will begin across the street from the Ruth J. Simmons Center ( 94 Waterman Street) in the red area marked in the image below. There will also be a walkway sign in that area to indicate where your tour guide will meet you.

Parking information

College Hill visitors may find parking in Lot 68 Upper, also called the Power Street Parking Garage, located at 111 Power Street. The entrance to the garage is located at the intersection of Power and Thayer Streets. The Lot 68 Upper garage contains two pay stations, which are located at the front and rear of the garage. Please locate an empty parking space, purchase your visitor parking permit via one of the pay stations and place your receipt permit on your vehicle dashboard.

• Mon - Fri, 8:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. $3.00/hour

• All Day Rate until 6:00 p.m. (Monday - Friday) $15.00

If Brown University visitor parking is unavailable, visitors may find metered parking on the streets in and around campus. Parking meters in Providence do not accept cash or credit cards, payment is made using the Passport parking application. The Passport Parking App allows you to conveniently pay for parking from anywhere using your mobile device.

Private Tour Requests

If you would like to request a tour for a campus or community group at a different time, requests for private group tours can be submitted using this form. We ask that all requests are made at least two weeks in advance in order for our team to properly manage the logistics.
Note: The Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice is open Monday–Friday from 8 AM–4 PM, so our tours typically only take place within our operating hours.

Join the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative (NAISI) and Brown University Fellowships staff for a CNAIS + Fellowships Info Session!

What you’ll learn:

• Overview of Critical Native American and Indigenous Studies (CNAIS) concentration requirements
• How CNAIS complements other concentrations
• Fellowships available to CNAIS concentrators, with particular focus on the Udall Fellowship

Hear from:

• Professor Mack Scott, NAISI Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS)
• Ashley Gale, Assistant Director of Fellowships and Post-Graduate Opportunities
• Joel Simundich, The Anne Crosby Emery Associate Dean of the College for Fellowships

Join the Taubman Center for the annual Noah Krieger Memorial Lecture as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie delivers a provocative examination of the structural cracks threatening our democratic foundations. One of the nation’s sharpest political voices, Bouie combines historical insight with unflinching analysis to diagnose what’s gone wrong and what might be done about it.

From institutional failures to political inequality, Bouie will dissect the forces undermining democratic governance and explore whether America’s democratic experiment can survive its current moment. This is essential viewing for anyone trying to understand our political crisis and what comes next.

Open to all. Don’t miss this critical conversation about democracy’s future.

The Brown Late Antique Group (BLAG) is excited to host Edward Watts, Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair and Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, on October 7th for a presentation and conversation about his current project on merging the past and present in Constantine’s Rome. Professor Watts will guide us through a selection of material evidence and literary sources to consider how space and art influenced how people in antiquity made sense of the past, present, and future.

What does the Roman world look like if, instead of assuming women were mostly disempowered, we instead assume that they were able to actively manage and change all of the realities around them? Using an interchronological approach that considers how the words and actions of figures from the past shape both Roman understandings of their present and expectations for their future, this lecture shows how literature, public commemorations, and monuments encouraged Romans of both genders to connect with female political exemplars by speaking their words, feeling their emotions, and understanding the circumstances surrounding their political interventions. These omnipresent, politically engaged Roman women then taught all Romans that their society did not just tolerate female political activity. Sometimes its survival even required it. 

Edward Watts holds the Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair and is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. He received undergraduate degrees in Classics and Ancient and Medieval Cultures at Brown University in 1997, and received his PhD in History from Yale University in 2002. He is the author of seven books and the editor of five more, including Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny (Basic Books, 2018), a narrative history of the last three centuries of the Roman Republic, and The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford University Press, 2021), which traces the 2200-year history of claims about Roman decline and the victims they created. His most recent book, The Romans: A 2000 Year History (Basic Books, 2025), tells the story of the Roman state from the 8^th century BC through 1204 AD. His work has also been featured in Time, the BBC, Vox, Smithsonian, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. 

Students: learn more about grant funding for your research!

This is an info session for undergrad and grad students to learn more about this year’s Pembroke Center student research grants and how to apply. Pizza and soft drinks provided.

For more information, contact Helis Sikk (helis_sikk@brown.edu) or Wendy Lee (wendy_lee@brown.edu). Applications for the 2025-26 academic year will be due on Monday, October 13, 2025. Applications open to current Brown students conducting research related to women, gender, and/or sexuality.

This talk explores the journey of tracing the Nightingale family from St. Marys, Georgia, back to Providence, Rhode Island, uncovering potential connections to the white Nightingale family of Providence. Through extensive archival research, oral histories, and the rediscovery of burial grounds, the presentation reconstructs a powerful narrative of displacement, survival, and memory. The discussion examines how geography, archival silences, and generational knowledge intersect in Black ancestral reclamation, offering both historical insight and personal resonance.

Lunch will be provided.

This program is co-sponsored by the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University, the First Unitarian Church of Providence, and Providence Preservation Society.

The summer 2025 cohort of John Hay Library Undergraduate Fellows will present their projects during a showcase on Friday, October 3 at 11 a.m. in the John Hay Library Primary Source Lab (321). Light refreshments will be served.

Join the Taubman Center for American Politics & Policy for a special Politics & Policy event celebrating the launch of House of Diggs, the latest book by Marion Orr, the Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science and Urban Studies at Brown University.

In this timely and deeply researched political biography, Dr. Orr tells the dramatic story of Charles C. Diggs Jr., Michigan’s first Black congressman and a pioneering figure in American politics. Drawing from extensive archival work, House of Diggs explores Diggs’s rise to national prominence as a civil rights advocate and influential legislator, his complex legacy, and the broader story of Black political power in the postwar United States.

Dr. Orr will discuss the book’s major themes—including race, institutional power, political scandal, and redemption—and reflect on its relevance for understanding American democracy today.

Join us for this opportunity for graduate students working in antiquities across departments to meet, connect and learn more about the Center for Global Antiquity. 

About the Event

Many poets around the world have written about Gaza over the last three years to express their solidarity with the Palestinian people who continue to endure genocide, starvation and indiscriminate violence. For these poets, their cultural, historical and religious backgrounds inevitably shape both the mode of expression and the perspective from which this ongoing tragedy is addressed. Miled Faiza has chosen to collect a selection of poems about Palestine written by Irish poets whose contemporary history of colonization and sectarian violence gives them a unique perspective. Faiza is translating these poems into Arabic and analyzing how the poets convey their solidarity with the victims and their condemnation of the ongoing genocide. In this talk he will discuss the reasons behind his focus on Irish poetry and present selected examples written in response to and as testimony to what is unfolding in Gaza. Faiza will also explore the aesthetic dimensions of these texts and the role of literary translation as an act of resistance and a tool for countering erasure.

About the Speaker

Miled Faiza is a Tunisian poet and literary translator and an associate teaching professor of Arabic at Brown University. His poetry collections include “Baqāya al-bayt allaḏī daḵalnāhu marratan wāḥida” (2004) and “Asabaʕu an-naḥḥāt” (2019). He has translated several works by Ali Smith, including the Booker Prize–shortlisted novel “Autumn” (al-Kharif, 2017), as well as “Winter” (al-Shitā’, 2019) and “Spring” (ar-Rabiʕ, 2023). He has also collaborated with Karen McNeil on translations of Amira Ghenim’s “A Calamity of Noble Houses” (January 2025) and Shukri Mabkhout’s “The Italian” (2021). Miled’s poetry and translations have appeared in various Arabic and international journals, such as WLT, New England Review, Banipal, Alquds al-Arabi and Revue Siecle 21.

About the Event

Brown’s Center for Middle East Studies will host a conversation between Vivian Salama, former White House reporter for The Wall Street Journal and current staff writer at The Atlantic, and Center Director Elias Muhanna. Their discussion will cover Salama’s experience reporting on the White House, her work as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, and her insights on current U.S. policy in the region.

About the Speaker

Vivian Salama is a staff writer with The Atlantic, covering politics and foreign policy. She has covered U.S. foreign policy and national security for nearly two decades, reporting from more than 85 countries.

Since moving to Washington in 2016, Salama has covered the White House and national security for The Wall Street Journal, CNN, NBC News and the Associated Press. During that time, she has broken a number of major stories involving the Trump White House, including details on the president’s first White House phone call with the Mexican president, details on the administration’s controversial travel ban, and President Trump’s interest in buying Greenland.

Over the course of her career, she has called Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan, Israel and the Palestinian territories and the United Arab Emirates home. Before moving to Washington, Salama was Baghdad bureau chief for the Associated Press, covering the rise and fall of the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, as well as Iran’s growing influence across the region. She also covered the refugee and IDP crisis spurred by the violence, visiting camps across the Middle East. The experience inspired Salama to write a children’s book – The Long Journey Home – about an innocent Syrian boy who is forced to flee his home because of the war.

Prior to her posting in Iraq, Salama had covered the Arab Spring uprisings – and their fallout – writing extensively about the political, economic and social implications of the protests. She also wrote at length about U.S. foreign policy in the region, as well as its evolution with the new regimes that came to power following the protests. Salama has also spent time in Yemen investigating the U.S. targeted killing program, traveling repeatedly to al-Qaeda strongholds in the country documenting civilian casualties.

Salama is a fluent Arabic speaker. While the bulk of her overseas experience has been in the Middle East and South Asia, she has also reported in North Korea, the Balkans, and across East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and South America. She began her career working for television networks in New York City and Providence, Rhode Island.

Salama has a law degree from Georgetown University, a Master’s from Columbia University in Islamic Politics and a Bachelor’s degree in journalism from Rutgers University. She is a native of New York and currently lives in Washington, DC.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

Free, open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact globalbrown@brown.edu

Light Lunch fare will be provided for attendees and will be available starting at 11:45am.

This lecture explores the development of alchemical theory and practice across distinct but interconnected regions—Graeco-Roman Egypt, Byzantium, and the Near East—from antiquity to the early Islamic period. By combining close textual analysis with experimental reconstructions of ancient alchemical procedures, it aims to illuminate the material practices behind the texts. Drawing on a series of laboratory experiments informed by historical and philological research, the lecture will reconstruct how ancient alchemists worked and offer fresh interpretations of the texts and literary forms through which their knowledge was transmitted. In doing so, it presents a comprehensive, longue durée perspective on the evolution of alchemy, revealing it as a dynamic and diverse art shaped by multiple technical and intellectual traditions.

About the Speaker

Matteo Martelli is professor in History of Science at the University of Bologna, where he teaches history of ancient science and technology along with history of ancient medicine. His research focuses on Graeco-Roman and Byzantine science – with particular attention to alchemy and medicine (pharmacology) – and its reception in the Syro-Arabic tradition. His publications include The Four Books of Pseudo-Democritus (2014) and Collecting Recipes. Byzantine and Jewish Pharmacology in Dialogue (2017; edited with L. Lehmhaus). In the framework of the AlchemEast project is currently working on a critical edition and translation of the alchemical books by Zosimus of Panopolis as they are preserved in the Syriac tradition.

About the Brown-University of Bologna Lecture Series

Founded in 2017 to commemorate Brown’s long-standing partnership with the University of Bologna, which now marks 45 years, the Brown-Bologna Lecture Series celebrates the enduring collaboration between our institutions in advancing innovative research, impactful teaching and learning, and immersive cultural exchange.

In 1840, millions of Black Americans groaned in the chains of slavery. By 1920, millions of American men and women of every race had won the vote.
In Born Equal, the prizewinning constitutional historian Akhil Reed Amar recounts the dramatic constitutional debates that unfolded across these eight decades, when four glorious amendments abolished slavery, secured Black and female citizenship, and extended suffrage regardless of race or gender. At the heart of this era was the epic and ever-evolving idea that all Americans are created equal. The promise of birth equality sat at the base of the 1776 Declaration of Independence. But in the nineteenth century, remarkable American women and men—especially Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Fredrick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln—elaborated a new vision of what this ideal demanded. Their debates played out from Seneca Falls to the halls of Congress, from Bloody Kansas to Gettysburg, from Ford’s Theater to the White House gates, ultimately transforming the nation and the world.

An ambitious narrative history and a penetrating work of legal and political
analysis, Born Equal is a vital new portrait of America’s winding road toward equality.

About the Speaker

Akhil Reed Amar is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches constitutional law in both Yale College and Yale Law School. 

We live in an era of big problems and small details. It is a time of globalization and atomization, of big data and nanotechnology — nothing is too minute to escape surveillance, regulation, or sale, and “scalability” is often touted as a measure of success. Scale is the stuff of awe and the sublime and the feeling of utter insignificance. Can one person’s behavior change the way an entire system works (“personalized medicine,” or climate change)? When does a change in scale mean a change in kind? Is morality/ethics a question of scale? Should we think big, or is the devil in the details? Faculty panelists from a variety of fields and interests discussed the theme of “Scale” from their own disciplinary perspectives.

Brown University Panelists

• Mark Blyth, William R. Rhodes ’57 Professor of International Economics, Professor of International and Public Affairs, Director of the William R. Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance
• Holly Case, Professor of History, Professor of Humanities, Deputy Director of the Data Science Institute
• Jonathan Pober, Associate Professor of Physics
• Deepti Raghavan, Assistant Professor of Computer Science
• Ada Smailbegović, Associate Professor of English

Moderated by Suresh Venkatasubramanian, Professor of Data Science and Computer Science, Professor of Humanities, Director of the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination, and Redesign (CNTR) with the Data Science Institute 

This event kicked off the second year of programming of the Collaborative Humanities Lab “Models-Scale-Context: AI and the Humanities” at the Cogut Institute, led by Holly Case and Suresh Venkatasubramanian.

A reception followed the event.

Image:AI-assisted illustration forHILOBROW (edited)

Exhibit Opening Reception

The “Fashioning Insurrection: From Imperial Resistance to American Orientalisms” exhibit opening reception will take place at the John Hay Library on Tuesday, September 9, 2025 at 4:30 p.m.

Free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be available.

Exhibit

Part of the Islamic-American Exchanges Initiative between the Brown University Library and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the exhibit, “Fashioning Insurrection: From Imperial Resistance to American Orientalisms,” will be on view in the Harriette Hemmasi Exhibition Gallery at the John Hay Library during the 2025-26 academic year, opening on August 25, 2025. The John Hay Library is open to the public during normal hours of operation.

Americans have adapted uniforms into costumes since the masquerade balls of colonial days to today’s historical films and battle reenactments. The practice took an unexpected form in the first decades following the American Revolution when the early presses of the United States closely covered imperial insurrections that unfolded across Islamicate societies against the three towering empires of the era: the Greek War of Independence against the Ottomans (1821–29), the Ottoman Algerian resistance to the French (1830–48), and the Indian uprising against the British (1857).

Alongside depictions of these struggles, American popular media paid careful attention to the “national” dress and military uniforms that could potentially unify a revolution or even aid in controlling insurrection. As the young nation navigated its connections to the Islamicate world, some reinterpreted visual and sartorial modes of imperial resistance. The reverberations of these events led to the emergence of orientalist costumes and dress that transformed regional revolutionary garb into American fashion statements of solidarity, fascination, and emulation.

Through these forms of cosmopolitan materialism, Americans announced their political stances on historic movements, sometimes also asserting their country’s imperial ambitions and legacies as it solidified its standing in the world. Such sartorial translations from uniforms to fashion informed America’s evolving relationship with its own revolutionary past. Each medium these costumes inhabited aided Americans in creatively redefining their country’s transforming identity on the international stage while facing resonant issues in their new nation, including foreign trade, slavery, and humanitarianism. Alongside contextualizing documents, the works here vividly illustrate how the U.S. wielded these movements of imperial insurrection to remold its own world image and don it with aplomb.

Speaker: René Cordero, Ph.D. ’23, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Williams College

This event is part of the “University in the Middle—Past and Present” Lecture and Discussion Series. 

The “University in the Middle” series explores past and present instances of universities at the focus of political attention. How has the university fared under similar conditions in different contexts around the world and across time? Where are universities currently at the nexus of events, how did they come to be there, and what have been the effects on the lives and work of faculty and students, the aims and substance of scholarship, and the role and place of the university in society?

Join the Watson Institute for a conversation that examines the vital role of the rule of law in sustaining American democracy. Wendy J. Schiller, Interim Director of the Watson Institute, will moderate a discussion with Corey Brettschneider, Professor of Political Science, and Michael Vorenberg, Associate Professor of History.

“Lost Sisters, Lost But Not Forgotten” by Dawn Spears

Program:

• 9:30–10:00 a.m. – Breakfast and Mingle
• 10:00–10:15 a.m. – Welcome and Opening Remarks
• 10:15–10:45 a.m. – Project Description and Demonstration
• 10:45–11:00 a.m. – Coffee Break
• 11:00–11:45 a.m. – Community Collaborations
• 12:00–12:45 p.m. – Lunch (Provided)
• 12:45–1:00 p.m. – Special Thanks and Recognition
• 1:00–1:45 p.m. – Rethinking History and Reframing the Narrative
• 1:45–2:00 p.m. – Snack Break
• 2:00–2:45 p.m. – Ethics, Technology, and Art in Building a Community-Driven Project
• 2:45–3:00 p.m. – Snack Break
• 3:00–3:45 p.m. – Keynote: Lisa Brooks (Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi), Professor of American Studies and English, Amherst College
• 4:00–4:15 p.m. – Closing Remarks
• 4:15–5:00 p.m. – Reception

Full program

This paper, which is part of a larger project on natural and human-made disasters in Late Antiquity, examines the period after the siege, earthquake, or epidemic, when people attempted to return to their homes, livelihoods, and communities. It will examine a range of responses to the post-disaster environment, from legal recourses to reclaim lost property and institutionally backed drives for rebuilding on the one hand, to locally inflected rituals of cleansing and ecclesiastical practices of communal expiation on the other. While taking into account the many “survivor” stories from Late Antiquity, we shall emphasize how the differential impacts of disasters necessarily undercut any simplistic narrative of recovery and “resilience,” especially when we examine these impacts on local scales.

About the Speaker

Professor Kristina Sessa (AB, Princeton; PhD UC Berkeley) is a cultural and social historian of Late Antiquity, with a strong (and relatively recent) interest in environmental topics. She is currently writing a book about late ancient responses to and experiences of natural and human-made disasters. She teaches ancient and medieval history at The Ohio State University.

Presenting the fourth William R. Rhodes ’57 Ethics of Capitalism annual lecture:

How did business ethics come to be understood as something different from plain-old ethics? This lecture locates that departure in the middle decades of the nineteenth-century United States, specifically to the frictions that emerged from inter-regional commerce between Northern manufacturers and Southern slaveholders. The politics of slavery and abolition functioned in surprising ways to construct the business sector as a space where different rules applied. The outcome was a new notion of the market as a space functioning most efficiently when pesky concerns of morality did not intrude.

Q & A to follow moderated by Mark Blyth, Director of the Rhodes Center for International Economics & Finance.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Seth Rockman is a historian of the United States focusing on the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. His research unfolds at the intersection of slavery studies, labor history, material culture studies, and the history of capitalism. Rockman’s latest book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (2024), is an eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history that reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor.

The event will begin with a short sound performance on grieving the ungrieveable, based on the artist’s poem on the subject. The performance will be followed by a lecture on non-state archival practices and the interconnected violence of militarism and environmental degradation. Drawing from her experiences in Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Mexico, and beyond, Bucak examines the politics of erasure and the radical potential of the plurality of histories through the arts. In this lecture, Bucak will focus mainly on seven works that use the power of sound and performativity as narrative strengths to resist erasure.

Speaker Bio: Fatma Bucak’s works address the plurality of histories through a variety of artistic media. Bucak was 2024 Fellow in Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome. She was named one of the Royal Photographic Society’s ‘Hundred Heroines’, recognising the achievements of women in arts. Bucak has exhibited at the MOCA Toronto, PinchukArtCenter Kyiv, the Jewish Museum New York, Art in General, Palazzo Esposizioni, Castello di Rivoli, Kunsthaus Dresden, Brown University DWB Gallery, Biennale de Kinshasa, Venice Biennale, Goteborg Biennale, MAMAC Nice, MoMA’s Non-Fiction Films, ARTER Istanbul, Z33 Hasselt and Fondazione Merz. She was a winner of the 9th Italian Council. In 2024, she was awarded the Novo Nordisk Foundation Artistic Research Grant. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies- Practice-based Art Studies at the University of Copenhagen and Art Hub Copenhagen -supported by the Novo Nordisk Artistic Research Grant.

Composer Bio: Bahar Royaee is an Iranian composer and sound designer known for her work in both acoustic and electro-acoustic music. She composes music for opera, theatre, film, and chamber ensembles. Her compositions have been performed by renowned artists and groups, including Claire Chase, the International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, and Lamnth. In 2022, she was honoured to receive the prestigious Fromm Foundation Commission Award. Recent highlights of her career include performances at the Venice Biennale, the ECLAT Festival, and the Ultraschall Berlin ensemble.

Vocalist Bio: Canadian soprano Rose Hegele (she/her) explores the extremes of human vocal and artistic expression in 20th—and 21st-century music. She is active across genres, including avant-garde music, contemporary opera, and chamber music. She has performed at Boston’s Symphony Hall, the Institute of Contemporary Art, and Carnegie Hall. She is a founding member of the Der Gestanke Pierrot Ensemble, Peridot Duo, and Into the Light Ensemble, and sings with the Nightingale Vocal Ensemble and Vox Futura.

We will answer this question in relation to Nazi aspirations, relocation, the ubiquity of Holocaust places, mass removal of Jewish bodies, hiding, and lasting scars and silences in the landscape.

• Presenter: Anne Kelly Knowles
• Authors: Anne Kelly Knowles, University of Maine [organizer], Tim Cole, University of Bristol [organizer] and Paul B. Jaskot, Duke University [organizer] - Placing the Holocaust

This event is part of the April 25-26 conference:

The Spatial Turn in Holocaust and Genocide Studies: Space, Place and Mapping

Anne Kelly Knowles is a Historical Geographer and is the McBride Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Maine, where she leads the Digital & Spatial History Lab. She is the recipient of many grants and awards, including six grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her range of interests is reflected in monographs on Welsh immigration and the U.S. iron industry and edited volumes on historical GIS and the geographies of the Holocaust. Anne’s Holocaust research focuses on building, analyzing, and sharing spatio-temporal datasets of SS camps, Eastern European ghettos, and places in testimony. She is currently developing an atlas of the Holocaust.

Paul B. Jaskot is Professor of Art History & German Studies at Duke University. He is also the Director of the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab. Jaskot’s work focuses on the political history of culture during the Nazi period.

Tim Cole’s research ranges widely across social, landscape and environmental histories with a focus on the Holocaust and how it is remembered. He works in the digital humanities and co-produced research with communities and creatives.

WATCH LIVE

Join the Department of History and greater Brown community to celebrate the launch of Michael Vorenberg’s latest book, Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2025). 

About the book: Lincoln’s Peace challenges the narrative of a Civil War that ended neatly with an iconic surrender in April 1865. The book examines the many endings and non-endings of the war, from failed peace meetings to emancipation celebrations, arguing that the choice of an end date determines how the war is defined and remembered.

About the author: Michael Vorenberg is an Associate Professor of History who specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. history, with a particular focus on the topics of the Civil War, emancipation, law, and the U.S. Constitution.

Read a recent Q&A with Michael Vorenberg

In this talk, Priya Satia, Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History at Stanford University, explains how the history of a Sikh holy site in the semi-arid region of Punjab can help us better understand the cultural politics of environmental transformation during the era of British colonialism in South Asia.

Middle East Colloquium

About the Event
This talk examines the relationship between the concepts of “transcription” and “transition” in the development of Jean Sénac’s poetics, paying close attention to his engagements with Algerian būqāla poetry,a genre of oral texts recited by women in Algerian Arabic. As a Francophone pied-noir intellectual committed to Algerian independence, Sénac understood French as a “transitional language” to be employed only while a new Arabophone literary class could emerge. Driven by his exploration of būqāla poetry, Sénac thus abstracted transcription, an ethnographic practice with considerable colonial roots in Algeria, into a translational paradigm that allowed him to maintain his authority as a Francophone Algerian poet––an authority whose ultimate purpose was to negate itself. An analysis of key poems written and translated between the early 50s and late 60s allows us to observe how transcription became a conceptual paradigm through which Sénac reconfigured his relationship to the “voice of the people,” and his status as an anticolonial and Third-Worldist poet.

About the Speaker
Maru Pabón is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Brown University. She received her Ph.D. in comparative literature at Yale University with a certificate of concentration in Middle East Studies. Her current book project examines efforts to construct the “voice of the people” across Palestinian, Cuban, and Algerian Third-Worldist poetry. Along with Laure Guirguis, she is the co-editor of the volume “Art and Politics Between the Arab World and Latin America,” forthcoming with Brill in Spring 2025. Her writing and research has appeared in Middle Eastern Literatures, Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, Bidoun, Momus, and Bidayat.

PEC welcomes Graduate Students interested in Early Cultures to join us for our next Grad Forum: “What can I do this summer to prepare for the job market in the fall?”

Even at the best of times, an academic job search can be unpredictable–but advanced planning can help make things go a little smoother. Join Andrew Scherer (Anthropology, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World), Charles Carroll (Sheridan Center), and Gretel Rodriguez (History of Art and Architecture) as they discuss their thoughts and answer your questions about this very important topic!

How can considering the book as a historical and aesthetic object deepen our research as humanities scholars? Join Humanities and Classics Librarian Micah Saxton and Postdoctoral Research Associate Lisa Kraege in a hands-on book history workshop focused on the Hay Library’s Foster Collection of Horace. Participants will examine and interact with highlights from the collection to learn about bringing archival materials into their own research.

Reception to follow. Open to graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from Brown and RISD.

Since the start of 2024, Brown University faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences have published more than 40 books, including monographs, edited volumes, and translations. We hosted a celebration of these writers and the vibrancy of humanities research at Brown. The event included brief remarks and a book display that allowed for the exploration of this exceptional research and creative output. 

Featured Writers

• Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman (American Studies, English)
• Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (Comparative Literature, Modern Culture and Media)
• Keisha N. Blain (Africana Studies, History)
• Kwame Dawes (Literary Arts)
• Sasha-Mae Eccleston (Classics)
• Linford D. Fisher (History)
• Philip Gould (English)
• Paul Guyer (Philosophy, Emeritus)
• Françoise N. Hamlin (Africana Studies, History)
• Richard Kimberly Heck (Linguistics, Philosophy)
• Laird Hunt (Literary Arts)
• Lucy Ives (Literary Arts)
• Julia Jarcho (Theatre Arts and Performance Studies)
• Liwei Jiao (East Asian Studies)
• Stephen E. Kidd (Classics)
• Andrew Laird (Classics, Hispanic Studies)
• Jennifer L. Lambe (History)
• Brian Lander (History)
• Jinying Li (Modern Culture and Media)
• Mohamed Amer Meziane (French and Francophone Studies)
• Jeffrey Moser (History of Art and Architecture)
• Ourida Mostefai (Comparative Literature, French and Francophone Studies)
• Paul E. Nahme (Religious Studies)
• Dietrich Neumann (History of Art and Architecture, Italian Studies)
• Saul M. Olyan (Judaic Studies, Religious Studies)
• Benjamin Parker (English)
• Felipe Martínez Pinzón (Hispanic Studies)
• Jason Protass (Religious Studies)
• Joseph Pucci (Classics)
• Seth Rockman (History)
• Noliwe Rooks (Africana Studies)
• Tricia Rose (Africana Studies)
• Amy Russell (Classics, History)
• Kenneth S. Sacks (Classics, History)
• Kate Schapira (English)
• Thomas Schestag (German Studies)
• Eleni Sikelianos (Literary Arts)
• Kerry Smith (East Asian Studies, History, Sociology)
• Tracy L. Steffes (Education, History)
• Michael Vorenberg (History)
• Hye-Sook Wang (East Asian Studies)
• Esther Whitfield (Comparative Literature, Hispanic Studies)

Schedule of Events

9:30 Coffee and welcome

10:00 Introduction (Gretel Rodríguez and Meghan Rubenstein)

10:15 Laurel Bestock | “Seeing and Being Seen: Ancient Egyptian serdab Statues and their Contexts.”

In the Egyptian Old Kingdom (ca. 2650-2120 BCE) many elite tombs were provided with small rooms that scholars term “serdabs.” These rooms were above-ground parts of the tomb chapel and were designed to hold a statue or statues. They are characterized by their inaccessibility—once the statue was emplaced, the room was sealed, sometimes with a slit left through which the statue could see out, but never with any means for a visitor to the tomb to see in. The invisibility of the serdab statues was essential to their function, which was to receive offerings from visitors to the tomb and, it will be argued, to perpetuate social relationships that included an element of hierarchy across the boundary of death. What happens when such a statue is removed from its original context and displayed in a museum? This paper will address both how such statues allowed their original contexts to function and how different museums have chosen to engage with their visibility or invisibility in ways that engage seeing and power in today’s world.

11:00 David Kertai | “An Ornamental Monumentality: On the Interplay Between Architecture and Sculpture in Assyrian Royal Palaces.”

Assyrian palaces are best known for the sculptures that decorated the inner walls of their most monumental rooms. These sculptures are characterized by their large size, their overall shallow depth and the prominence given to inscribed texts. Four royal palaces decorated with sculptures have been excavated from Late Assyrian period (ca. 900-612 BCE). These provide a detailed view on the different sculptural programs. And yet much remains unclear about the roles these sculptures played in their architectural settings. This is partially due to a persistent Modernist focus on space, morphology, and typology to the detriment of the central role played by ornament in the Assyrian conception of architecture. Understanding the architecture of these palaces as forms of monumental ornamentation, this paper explores the central roles played by sculptures in providing meaning to the spaces they decorated and the sensorial experiences they might have evoked in individuals navigating the palaces.

11:45 Patricia Eunji Kim | “The Gallery of Shield-Portraits at the Delian Monument to Mithradates VI.”

In 102/101 BCE, the Athenian priest Helianax commissioned an unusual monument at Delos on behalf of the Pontic king Mithradates VI: a rectangular distyle in antis building was designed as a gallery of the king’s most important friends and generals. The monument boasted a total of thirteen shield-portraits (hopla). While each shield was carved into the surface of the masonry, the portrait busts were sculpted separately and then attached to or “hung” on those walls by iron pins. Inscriptions accompany each of the portraits, guiding the viewer with information about the person’s name, political role, and familial connections. The highly curated and particularly arranged display of honorific portraiture in a gallery of shields-as-art makes the Delian monument unique, prompting two questions for exploration. First, the spatial and sensory conditions that the building created demand analysis; how might we articulate the viewing experiences that the monument’s architecture and sculpture afforded? Second, the Hellenistic- period phenomenon of the shield-portrait is a distinctive category of representation that extended personhood—not only on the battlefield, but also in significant cultural and political arenas; what does the shield-portrait reveal about the aesthetic logics of weaponry in the ancient world?

12:30 - 2:00 Lunch break

2:00 Max Peers | “Buildings Set in Stone: Architecture and Sculpture from Living Bedrock on Punic-Roman Sardinia.”

This paper examines three structures from Punic-Roman Sardinia that blur the lines between sculpture, architecture, and geology in that each is partially carved from living bedrock. As such, the material and spatial characteristics of the different stages of construction—the quarrying, masonry, decoration, etc.—are collapsed into a single locus of activity and must be conceived of together, just as the ancient builders probably did. I examine the phases of, and individuals involved in, the construction of these structures through the lens of the chaîne opératoire, to understand who might have worked on the different elements of the structure, what skills they brought, and how they worked together with the stone in situ and made on site. Through my analysis, I demonstrate how the natural environment and local stone determined designs and building practices. The case studies I consider imbricate loci of work to a single location, which reveals a complex set of factors at play at these building sites, but I also argue that these conclusions concerning stone in states from raw and living to finished and installed, are applicable in other contexts in which local stone is being used for architecture and sculpture.

2:45 Meghan Rubenstein | “Monster Mouth Doorways and the Nature of Maya Architecture.”

Maya artists regularly collapsed boundaries separating the natural and supernatural realms, depicting rulers, ancestors, and deities together with sentient objects and zoomorphic beings. This paper explores how architectural sculpture reinforces that view of an animate and fluid world, looking specifically at the extraordinary, though perhaps misnamed, monster mouth doorways in the Yucatán peninsula. I propose these striking tooth-lined portals marked a point of transition between the natural and supernatural worlds, underscoring the ability of architecture to realize abstract concepts rooted in Maya ontology. This research, which analyzes iconography, materiality, and sensory-oriented design, also speaks to the phenomenological experience of monumental architecture during the Late Classic period (ca. 600-900 CE). The study of this subset of architectural sculpture elucidates the nature of Maya architecture, allowing us to better understand, from our modern perspective, the people who conceptualized, built, and used these monuments.

3:30 Nancy Steinhardt | “Architectural Sculpture in the Ancient World: the View from China.”

This paper seeks to define architectural sculpture in China before the year 1500 CE. It begins by confirming that relief sculpture has been standard on interior walls of tombs and interior and exterior rock-carved surfaces from the late centuries BCE and early CE centuries. The paper argues that, since those times, relief sculpture is interchangeable with wall painting as the primary means of narration, and that often an inscription is not necessary to understand what is represented. In Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian contexts the narration can be considered iconography, is inherently repetitive, and rarely experimental. With this background, we turn to five highly important types of Chinese architectural sculpture that, it will be proposed, have unique Chinese contexts: the gate-tower, with a focus on first- and second-century CE examples; exterior surfaces of Liao-dynasty (907-1125) monumental pagodas; eleventh- and twelfth-century examples of an interior, wooden wall technique known as xiaomuzuo (small-scale carpentry); marble door-pillows and related sculpture positioned only at the foot of a door; and two examples of miniature stages made at China’s premier porcelain kiln in Jingdezhen. In the conclusion, the paper seeks to determine if similar kinds of architectural sculpture existed in other parts of the Ancient World.

4:15-4:30 Coffee break

4:30 - 5:30 Response by Itohan Osayimwese / Group discussion

5:30 - 6:30 Reception

For more information, please visit our event website. 

Joyce Chaplin (Harvard University) will present her book The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025) as part of the series JCB Reads, a hybrid event opportunity for former fellows to share their recent book publications with the JCB community.

This installment of JCB Reads will be hybrid (in-person and virtual). Join us!

What do the humanities offer when the human has been decentered, if not entirely replaced, by technologies of artificial intelligence and artificial life? To what extent are the humanities being tested, expanded, energized, or obscured by their growing intersection with the sciences and social sciences today?

In this workshop, scholars from art history, data science, history of science, literature, and rhetoric explore the notion of “models” as a particular way of understanding the modes, methods, and shapes that responses to these challenges have taken, both historically and today. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, the event will thematize the varied and often conflicting ways that models produce relationships, including with the realities and entities they purport to describe.

Convened by Lindsay Caplan (History of Art and Architecture) and Debbie Weinstein (American Studies). Presented by the Collaborative Humanities Lab “Models-Scale-Context: AI and the Humanities” at the Cogut, led by Holly Case and Suresh Venkatasubramanian.

Free and open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.

Speakers

• David Bates (University of California, Berkeley)
• Holly Case (Brown University)
• Jacob Gates Foster (Indiana University)
• Tung-Hui Hu (University of Michigan)
• Juliet Koss (Scripps College)
• Tara Suri (Harvard University)

Schedule

About the Speakers

David W. Bates is a professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, an affiliate with the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society, and past director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. He earned his Ph.D. in European history from the University of Chicago. His research and teaching are focused on the relations between technology and cognition, and the history of political and legal thought. His most recent book is An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence: Thinking with Machines from Descartes to the Digital Age (University of Chicago Press, 2024). He has previously published two books on early modern thought — Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France (Cornell University Press, 2002) and States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political (Columbia University Press, 2011) — and edited (with Nima Bassiri) Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject (Fordham University Press, 2015).

Holly Case is a professor of history and the humanities at Brown University and is co-leader of the inaugural collaborative humanities lab “Models-Scale-Context: AI and the Humanities” at the Cogut Institute. She is a historian of modern Europe whose work focuses on the relationship between foreign policy, social policy, science, and literature in the European state system of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her first book, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during WWII (Stanford University Press, 2009), shows how the struggle for mastery among Europe’s Great Powers was affected by the perspectives of small states. Her second book, The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2018) explores when and why people started thinking in terms of “questions,” and how it altered their sense of political possibility. She has written on European history, literature, politics and ideas for various magazines and newspapers, including The Guardian, The Chronicle Review, Aeon, The Nation, Dissent, The Times Literary Supplement, Eurozine, and Boston Review.

Jacob G. Foster is a professor of informatics and cognitive science at Indiana University, Bloomington, and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He studies the social production of collective intelligence, the evolutionary dynamics of ideas, and the co-construction of culture and cognition. In his empirical work, he blends computational methods with qualitative insights from science studies to probe the strategies, dispositions, and social processes that shape the production and persistence of scientific and technological ideas. His theoretical work focuses on the principles behind natural and artificial intelligences and on the social science of the possible. He is co-director of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, a program that aims to build community, collaboration, and creative thinking among early career scholars interested in the study of mind, cognition, and intelligence of diverse forms and formats — from ants and apes to humans and AI. He earned his Ph.D. in statistical physics and complex systems from the University of Calgary, and he trained as a social scientist as a postdoctoral scholar and research assistant professor at the University of Chicago. From 2020-2021, he was an Infosys Member at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Tung-Hui Hu is an associate professor of English and digital studies at the University of Michigan. He is a media theorist and a poet and the author of five books, most recently Digital Lethargy (MIT Press, 2022), A Prehistory of the Cloud (MIT Press, 2015), and Greenhouses, Lighthouses (Copper Canyon Press, 2013).

Juliet Koss is the Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Professor of the History of Architecture and Art at Scripps College. She has published widely on modern European art, architecture, and design, with an emphasis on Germany and the USSR. Her first book, Modernism After Wagner (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), was a finalist for the College Art Association’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University, where she is completing “Model Soviets,” a book on model objects, scale, and temporality in 1920s and 1930s Moscow, for MIT Press.

Tara Suri is a Prize Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for History and Economics. She is a historian of science and society in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Her work draws together histories of medicine, health, and the environment; histories of decolonization and the global Cold War; and histories of race, gender, caste, and sexuality. Her current book project traces the history of South Asia’s global biomedical trade in rhesus monkeys. In 2025, she will join Dartmouth College’s history department as an assistant professor.

Images from The New Landscape in Art and Science by Gyorgy Kepes, Paul Theobald and Co., 1956

About the Event
In August 2024, a mural reading “Palestina Livre: do Rio ao Mar” (Free Palestine, from the river to the sea) appeared at a major São Paulo intersection, igniting controversy amid the Israel-Gaza war. While critics condemned it as antisemitic, supporters framed it as solidarity with the Palestinian people. This incident highlighted Brazil’s deep entanglement with the Israel-Palestine conflict—an engagement that traces back not to May 1948 or October 7, 2023, but to a pivotal moment in 1979.

In this talk Elmaleh determines and revisits 1979 as the year zero of this ongoing discourse in Brazil, with the arrival of Dr. Farid Sawan, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) representative to Brazil, and his demand to establish an official diplomatic office. Rapidly emerging as a flashpoint, a seemingly technical request turned what had once been a mostly distant geopolitical issue into a pressing domestic debate, sparking media polarization, diplomatic maneuvering and political divisions. Using theoretical framing of soft power and public diplomacy, this study explores how non-state and state actors shaped public opinion, revealing a critical episode in the intersection of transnational politics and diaspora activism under the Cold War ideological climate. More broadly, it triggers broader discussions on oil geopolitics, global power dynamics, and Brazil’s role within the evolving Global South.

About the Speaker 
Omri Elmaleh is a visiting assistant professor in Israel Studies at the Judaic Studies Program. He is a historian specializing in Latin America with deep expertise in Middle Eastern diasporas across the regions. His research examines the dynamic movements of people, goods, ideas and even animals between the Luso-Hispanic and Arab-Muslim worlds, uncovering overlooked connections that have shaped both geographies. By bridging Latin American and Middle Eastern studies, his work offers a transregional perspective on migration, identity, trade networks, international relations and cultural exchange.

You are invited to register for this virtual lecture with Professor Paul Binski, Emeritus Professor of the History of Medieval Art, University of Cambridge, on March 19 at 5:30 p.m. Register for this event at https://forms.gle/iJWexwS2ojM4wk8c8

Abstract

The dynamic of antisemitism in medieval England owes its historical profile to the fact that King Edward I (1272-1307) expelled the Jewish population, by then numbering no more than about 3,000, from England in 1290, the first major act of its kind. In 1306, Philippe IV of France followed by expelling an estimated 100,000 Jews from France. Though relatively small, the Jewish communities of England had been embedded in urban centres since at least the 11th century, and there was a lively and not always harmonious culture of debate about Christian-Jewish relations. This illustrated talk will introduce the urban and religious environment of English Jews, their economic position in cities, their repeated exposure to blood libels, accusations of child murder, urban unrest, as well as Christian antisemitic imagery in the 12th century. It will go on to look at their relationship to power, the Crown particularly, up to the moment when the expulsion was decreed on 18th July 1290 - the ninth of Ab being deliberately chosen by the royal agents to mark the holy day commemorating the destruction of Jerusalem. The Jews survived in England more as an imaginary than a social reality until they were readmitted by Oliver Cromwell. How did their representation develop, and how did the use of the Hebrew Bible in royal imagery disclose attitudes more generally, especially at the court of Edward I himself?

Sponsored by Arthur B & David B Jacobson Fund.

Professor Rebecca Nedostup of the History and East Asian Studies departments will host a talk with Professor Janet Chen, Department of History, Princeton University.

At the end of 1975, the KMT government in Taiwan passed the Radio and Television Law, designating Mandarin as the “primary language of broadcasting” and mandating the reduction of dialect. This legislation was the culmination of more than twenty years of debates over the politics of language in mass media. Radio broadcasting had been a crucial component of the state apparatus for fighting the “psychological war” of “opposing the Communists and resisting the Soviets.” Yet using the national language as the medium of broadcasting made it difficult to effectively disseminate the messages crucial to sustaining the cause of anti-Communism. Programming in Minnanhua and Hakka could reach wider audiences, but at the cost of diluting the national language project. As the increasing popularity of television and the race for profits changed the stakes in the late 1960s, the effort to pass a broadcasting law encountered significant obstacles. This talk will examine the transformation of the mass media environment and how broadcasters navigated the competing goals of profit, entertainment, education, and ideology during the lengthy saga of the law’s passage.

Part of Brown 2026 and JCB 2026 and Beyond.

Join us at the John Carter Brown Library on March 11, 2025 at 5 p.m. for a conversation between Professor Gordon S. Wood and JCB Director and Librarian Karin Wulf.

Gordon S. Wood is Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. He received his B.A. degree from Tufts University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at Brown in 1969. He is the author of the Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969), which won the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize in 1970, and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize in 1993.

The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (2004) was awarded the Julia Ward Howe Prize by the Boston Authors Club in 2005. Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different was published in 2006. The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History was published in 2008. His volume in the Oxford History of the United States, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (2009) was given the Association of American Publishers Award for History and Biography in 2009, the American History Book Prize by the New York Historical Society for 2010, and the Society of the Cincinnati History Prize in 2010.

In 2011 he was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Obama and the Churchill Bell by Colonial Williamsburg. In 2011 he also received the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, Award from the Society of American Historians. In 2012 he received an award from the John Carter Brown Library and the John. F. Kennedy Medal from the Massachusetts Historical Society. In 2015 he received the Centennial Medal from the Harvard Graduate School. In 2015 he edited two volumes, The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate: 1764-1776, for the Library of America. He reviews in the New York Review of Books. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Chloe Ireton (Lecturer in the History of Iberia and the Iberian World 1500-1800, Department of History, University College London) will present her book Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic (Cambridge University Press, 2024) on March 10 at noon as part of the series JCB Reads, a hybrid event opportunity for former fellows to share their recent book publications with the JCB community.

This installment of JCB Reads will be virtual, but we plan to host hybrid (both virtual and in-person) events in the coming months!

The Modern Greek Studies Program and the Brown Department of Classics cordially invite you to join Omer Bartov, Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Elsa Amanatidou, Director of Brown MGS and Tony Molho, the David Herlihy University Professor Emeritus for a discussion of Courage and Compassion, Professor Molho’s memoir of survival in wartime Thessaloniki, Greece.

First published in Greek in 2023, Courage and Compassion (Berghahn Books, 2024) is a poignant study of the Shoah and its aftermath in Greece, filtered through the consciousness of the adult narrator who intersperses his experiences with meditations on identity and belonging and the place of Jews in Greek society and history.

In this extraordinary personal account of childhood and survival during the Holocaust, Tony Molho recounts his adventures in 1940s Greece from ages four to six, as his parents risked everything to hide him from the German occupiers. In doing so he pays homage to the many ordinary people who selflessly protected his family, demonstrating that even in the darkest times the self-sacrifice and kindness of modest people can still prevail. Delving into the power of memory, and exploring questions of personal identity, and the weight of the Shoah, Courage and Compassion goes beyond the bounds of conventional memoir, as Tony Molho also reflects on the nature of Jewish identity in the aftermath of the Holocaust and on how his personal awareness of this trauma has helped him to understand the course of his own life.

The Greek edition was awarded the OURANIS PRIZE of the Academy of Athens. 

Books will be available for purchase from 4:30-5:00 pm.

Middle East Colloquium series

About the Event
 Hidden within MIT’s Distinctive Collections, many architectural elements from the earliest days of the Institute still survive as part of the Rotch Art Collection. Among the artworks that were salvaged by conservators was a set of striking windows of gypsum and stained-glass, dating to the late 18th- to 19th c. Ottoman Empire. Similar stained-glass windows once graced the reception halls of elite homes, like al-ʿAzam Palace in Damascus and Bayt al-Razzaz in Cairo. Such halls have quickly disappeared due to the ravages of time, war, and recent earthquakes. Yet even prior to these events, many Ottoman-era windows came to Europe and the United States decontextualized as architectural elements or as part of full Islamic rooms, which visitors still admire today at institutions like the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

This exhibition illuminates the life of these historic windows, tracing their refracted histories from Egypt to MIT, their ongoing conservation, and the cutting-edge research they still prompt. Through facets of their narrative, these windows allow us to gaze into the history of architecture as a modern university discipline in the US and Europe. Their forms reflect key facets of architectural design in the Middle East and diverse approaches to the craft of window-making, which inspired collectors and designers across the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. This legacy of Islamic design continues to spark the imaginations of architects and artists in the region today (and abroad).

Curators from the Aga Khan Documentation Center (AKDC) uncovered these narratives through historical and archival research, alongside a new collaboration with the Wunsch Conservation Lab. Together, they commissioned a project conservator and documented the process of carefully cleaning and stabilizing these windows for exhibition and long-term preservation. They teamed up with MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Vitrocentre in Switzerland to run experiments to more precisely locate the origins of the materials used in these windows and their journey. Their research led to the commission of works from contemporary artist Dima Srouji (Palestine) and artisan Mohammd al-Dib (Egypt). 

About the Speaker
Gwendolyn Collaço is currently the Anne S.K. Brown Curator for Military & Society at Brown University’s John Hay Library. Prior to that, she held the position of Collection Curator of the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT, an archive relating to built environments of the Islamic world. There, she built a new collection of rare books, manuscripts, and art objects, which includes commissions from contemporary artists. Previously, she served as the Assistant Curator for Art of the Middle East at LACMA, where she contributed to the new permanent collection galleries and traveling exhibitions. Gwendolyn received her Ph.D. from the joint program for History of Art + Arch. and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, specializing in Islamic art. Her research interests span artistic exchanges between early-modern Islamic empires, Ottoman painting, print technologies of the Islamic world, and histories of collecting. Her current book project offers the first extended history of the commercial art market for manuscript paintings in Ottoman Istanbul. Her writing appears in journals, such as Ars Orientalis, Muqarnas, and several edited volumes.

Join the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice for a talk by Simmons Center/JCB Joint Postdoctoral Research Associate in Slavery and Justice Dr. Christopher Baldwin as he explores the centrality of maritime warfare in the formations of racial slavery and the African diaspora in the early modern Atlantic world. It highlights a chapter from his book project reconstructing the forced migrations of twenty-six captives from the African coast through their circuitous voyage across the Caribbean and seizure by a Bermudian privateer. The shipmates’ protracted journey reveals how serial embarkations and captivities compounded the upheavals of the Middle Passage, forcing the enslaved to form and re-form networks of survival across ethnic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds.

Christopher Baldwin is a historian studying the intersections of war, law, and enslavement in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. His research explores trans-imperial regimes of maritime law that enforced racial slavery and policed Black and Indigenous mobilities in the early modern Caribbean.

Lunch will be provided with registration. Please RSVP below.

About the Event

In this talk, Dr. Elizabeth Penry explores the little-studied yet rich world of what Indigenous Andeans made of Renaissance ideals. Dr. Penry challenges the assumption that the Renaissance was a singular phenomenon limited to Europe and understands it instead as a global movement of ideas. These ideas, carried globally by the Society of Jesus, the first religious order to take education as its mandate, included Mediterranean notions of rights and sovereignty grounded in ideas of civic humanism that became standard components of Jesuit pedagogy. Through Jesuit education and missionary activity in key sites like Juli and Potosí, Andeans gained Spanish language literacy and used it to navigate the colonial legal system, advocate for their rights, and challenge colonial hierarchies. Jesuits served a dual role as both enforcers of colonial order and, perhaps, inadvertent facilitators of Indigenous questioning of colonial domination, as their teaching of Renaissance civic humanism resonated with Andean concepts of reciprocity. Drawing on archival materials from Europe and the Americas, Dr. Penry highlights how Indigenous Andeans—commoners and elites alike—refashioned Jesuit teachings to assert autonomy, negotiate power, and reimagine their communities.

About the Speaker

Dr. S. Elizabeth Penry is a prize-winning historian of the colonial Andes and of Early Modern Spain. Her book, The People are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics (OUP, 2019), won the Howard Cline Prize for Ethnohistory from the Conference on Latin American History, the Flora Tristán Prize for the best book on Peru from the Latin American Studies Association, and the Best First Book from the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, among others. An Associate Professor of History at Fordham University (New York) and former Director of Fordham University’s Institute for Latin American and Latinx Studies, Dr. Penry’s work has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, Fulbright, a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. She currently serves on the board of the Renaissance Society of America. During 2024-2025, Dr. Penry is a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library. Her current research focuses on Spanish language literacy of Indigenous Andeans, and what they made of Renaissance ideas, introduced in part through their contact with Jesuit founded missions, schools and confraternities in the Viceroyalty of Peru.

About the Series

Graduate students and faculty affiliated with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies are invited to present their work at this roundtable luncheon series. Faculty and graduate student research presentations will alternate on a biweekly basis. All are welcome.

Beginning over 200 years ago, traditional Lakotan pictorial calendars, called “winter counts,” recorded events that members of each community experienced and considered important. These included interactions within the community here on earth as well as celestial events such as eclipses, comets, and the famous Leonid meteor shower in November 1833 that were visible in the Northern Plains skies. The touchstone of this presentation is a Lakotan winter count that records events from 1798 to 1919. Its event “glyphs” provide engaging origin points to explore Lakotan history and traditional narratives related to cosmology and star constellations visible in tonight’s sky.

Speaker Bio: Craig Howe, founder and Director of the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies (CAIRNS), earned a Ph.D. in architecture and anthropology from the University of Michigan. He served as Deputy Assistant Director for Cultural Resources at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Howe has authored articles and book chapters on numerous topics, including tribal histories, Native studies, museum exhibitions, and community collaborations. He has developed innovative tribal histories projects and creative museum exhibitions, lectures on American Indian topics across the U.S., and provides professional development and cultural awareness training to schools and organizations. Howe was raised and lives on his family’s cattle ranch in the Lacreek District of the Pine Ridge Reservation where he is designing and building Wingsprings, an architecturally unique retreat and conference center that is featured in New Architecture on Indigenous Lands. He is a citizen of the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

Forcibly removed from Jamaica in 1796 after waging war against the colonial state, the Trelawny Maroons boarded a ship bound for Nova Scotia, where they struggled against the colonial government until 1800, when they were relocated to Sierra Leone. This talk follows the Maroons across these three different British colonies in order to reconsider the political history of the Atlantic world. To tell the story of the Trelawny Maroons is to tell a characteristically Atlantic story whereby different groups reconstituted their sense of belonging in the face of flux and dislocation—an impulse common to Africans, indigenous Americans, and Europeans alike from the onset of the Atlantic age of exploration. War, enslavement, mercantilism, and imperial expansion facilitated the meeting of strangers and the making of kin. At the center of these Atlantic narratives are shared strivings—often violent, yet always creative—to persist in a world marked by rupture and discontinuity. I argue that the Maroons engaged in a worldmaking project rooted in an Atlantic political culture of oath-making that allowed them to recast their political subjectivity across different colonial spaces. The Maroons endeavored to bind themselves to a radical vision of fragmented sovereignty and a sense of diasporic community, revealing the deep historical connections between sovereignty and intimacy. By adopting a diasporic emphasis on ritual, materiality, and belonging, this project reorients a historiography of Black Atlantic revolutionary politics that too often emerges from a linear, progressive, and state-oriented perspective.

About the Speaker

Bradley L. Craig is a historian of early African American and Black Atlantic politics and culture. Broadly, his research examines the felt and embodied dimensions of diasporic belonging. His current book project, Oathbound: Sovereignty and Belonging in the Revolutionary Atlantic World, tells the story of Jamaica’s Trelawny Maroons and their forced migration to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone following the Anglo-Maroon War of 1795-96. The book shows how the Maroons participated in an Atlantic political culture of oath-taking, binding themselves to a particular vision of imperial belonging and diasporic kinship. Other research in progress considers the sensory history of race and slavery in the Atlantic world.

Bradley teaches courses on African American history, the history of the Black Atlantic, historical memory and reconciliation, black queer and feminist studies, and histories of the body and the senses. He earned an A.B. in Studies of Women, Gender & Sexuality, an A.M. in History, and a Ph.D. in African and African American Studies from Harvard University. Prior to joining the faculty at BU, he was a Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (University of Pennsylvania) and an Assistant Professor of History at Concordia University in Montréal, Quebec.

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. 

Talk title: “An Equine Metric for Climate Change? Using Horse Records to Understand the Medieval Climate Anomaly-Little Ice Age Transition in Inner Asian Borderlands”

Can records of horses provide a more detailed picture of the impact of climate change in the Inner Asian steppe? Climate history has increasingly gained traction as a way to understand moments of political rise and decline in Inner Asian history. Increases or decreases in temperature and precipitation, either aggregate or anomalous, have been listed as causes of the fall of the Uyghur Empire, the rise of the Mongol Empire or the declining fortunes of both the Yuan and Ming states in China. The horse was central to Inner Asian political and economic power. Horses were key to transportation, political power projection, pastoral practice, and the making of war. Yet, in climate histories, the horse has troublingly remained a less scrutinized factor: many scholars have assumed that climate variations that are good for grasslands create an animal abundance underpinning military and political success, whereas variation that handicap vegetation produces the opposite. How did warmer or cooler, drier or wetter climes impact horses in Inner Asia attempts by states to manage that change? The political transition from the Mongol Yuan to the Ming Empires stood at the crossroads of a climate transition between the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age from the 13th to 15th centuries. By combining paleoclimatic data for this transition in the Inner Asian steppe borderlands between China and Mongolia with dynastic and official records regarding the horse, I argue this climate transition stressed horse populations, informed southward migration, as well as impelled changes in horse policy that saw animal aid sent north into the steppe, relocated government pastures to more southerly steppe environments, and forced stricter legal regulation of equine bodies. I aim to demonstrate that these changes and policy adaptations exhibited remarkable continuity between the Yuan and Ming, challenging the idea of dynastic disjuncture between Mongol and Chinese states. Last, I suggest that continuity in climate stress on equine populations contributed to more intensive interactions along the Mongol-Ming borderlands.

Aaron Molnar is an Environmental Fellow at Harvard, working on Koryo/Mongol era climate history.

About the Event:
The arts of literature and architecture are symbiotic. In dedicatory inscriptions, travelogues, and ekphrastic praise poems, literature serves to describe, explicate, and celebrate architectural structures and their significance. But equally often architecture is at the service of literature, playing a crucial role in the construction of fictional worlds and providing the scene in which characters act and the narrative unfolds. Building projects frame the career of Alexander the Great as told by the Persian poet Nezāmi Ganjavi (d. 1209) in his Eskandarnāmeh. After Alexander first demonstrates his military prowess in battling the Ethiopians, his first order of business is to build the city of Alexandria; just before his death he erects a wall to prevent the demonic forces of Gog and Magog from invading the civilized world. Although Alexander is famous as a builder of cities, he destroys as often as he builds and is most often associated with the militaristic architecture of tents and fortresses. His encounters with palaces, religious sites, and domestic dwellings, however, shape his character significantly, leading to an ascetic critique of architecture as a whole, a critique symbolized by the natural shelter of the cave. Conversation with Paul Losensky (Indiana University) is hosted by Margaret Graves. 

About the Speaker:
Paul Losensky is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he taught Persian language and literature, translation theory and practice, and comparative studies of Western and Middle Eastern literatures. His research focuses on Persian poetry of the early modern period, biographical writing, and comparative studies in literature and architecture. His publications include Welcoming Fighāni: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in theSafavid-Mughal Ghazal (1998), Farid ad-Din ‘Attār’s Memorial of God’s Friends: Lives and Sayings of Sufis (2009), and In the Bazaar of Love: Selected Poems of AmirKhusrau (2013, with Sunil Sharma). He has authored numerous articles on Persian literature for journals such as Iranian Studies and is a contributor to Encyclopedia ofIslam and Encyclopaedia Iranica. Professor Losensky is currently working on a book the work of the master-poet of the seventeenth century, Sā’eb Tabrizi, and a new edition and translation of Nal o Daman by the poet-laureate of the Mughal court, Abu’l-Feyz Feyzi. He has served as chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and is a former fellow at the National Humanities Institute and the Bodleian Library.

Host
Margaret Graves, Adrienne Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture in honor of Marilyn Jenkins-Madina

Cosponsors
Islam & the Humanities Initiative
Department of the History of Art and Architecture
Department of Comparative Literature
Department of History
Center for the Study of the Early Modern World

About the Event

Who, and perhaps more importantly what, is a worker? Starting in the 1870s government officials, company managers, political organizers, and laboring people in Greater Syria (today’s Lebanon and Syria) began to ask this question. Faced with labor struggles from Beirut to Aleppo and beyond, a diverse set of historical actors realized something in common: the category of the “worker” was becoming central to how people organized and oriented themselves in a world increasingly ruled by capitalist social formations. They also recognized that the answer to this question was not immediately available. It would be worked out through social, legal and intellectual struggles over the next half century. This talk explores the history of “the worker question” in Greater Syria between 1870-1939 by examining the work stoppages, newspaper debates, and legislative initiatives which attempted to define or manage workers. Brown Postdoctoral fellow in Labor History Ellis Garey argues that over the course of the late Ottoman and early post-Ottoman period, it became impossible for a wide range of historical actors to make sense of their social reality without reference to the status of people who labored.

About the Speaker
Ellis Garey holds a Ph.D. in history and Middle Eastern studies from New York University. She recently joined Brown as the 2024-2026 Postdoctoral Fellow in Labor History. Her manuscript in progress, “Figuring Labor: The Emergence of the Worker in Greater Syria, 1870-1939,”attends to the emergence of “the worker” as both a social concept and as a historical actor in late-Ottoman and French Mandate Greater Syria. Her research has been published in The Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Associationand is forthcoming in the Radical History Review.

The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies is delighted to share a ‘Back from the Field’ poster presentation featuring affiliated graduate students, Research Award Recipients for Pre-Dissertation Field Research, Summer 2024:

Gonzalo Aguirre, Chile (Anthropology)
Matthew Balance, Bolivia (Anthropology)
Alyssa Bolster, Peru (Anthropology)
Licelot Caraballo, Dominican Republic (Anthropology)
João Pedro Coleta, Argentina (Portuguese and Brazilian Studies)
Maria Luiza Thayná Frigotto da Silva, Brazil (Portuguese and Brazilian Studies)
Moises Herrera Parra, México (Anthropology)
Heloisa Krüger Barreto, Chile (Portuguese and Brazilian Studies)
Sigi Macias, Argentina (History)
Luis Fernando Moreira da Costa, Brazil (Portuguese and Brazilian Studies)
Mariana Mota Lopes, Chile (Portuguese and Brazilian Studies)

All are welcome. 

These research awards are possible thanks to the Sarmiento and William R Rhodes for Latin American funds. 

This talk deals with the place of books and libraries in the production of global knowledge in the early sixteenth century. In particular, it explores the intersection of the world’s shifting image in the eyes of its inhabitants and the growing variety of unfamiliar objects that Europeans physically encountered around the globe and acknowledged as “books.” Their exclusion from Renaissance universal libraries raises doubts about the extent to which such terms as “universal” and “global” should be used interchangeably when it comes to the relationship between libraries and knowledge.

About the Speaker

Giuseppe Marcocci is Professor of Early Modern Global History at the University of Oxford. His research has mostly focused on the historical experience of those who lived in the global empires of Spain and Portugal during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Large part of his work is concerned with issues of power relations as diffracted through sources and materials produced at a time of change, instability, and weak legitimacy. He is also strongly interested in reconsidering established interpretations of early modern epistemologies from alternative geographies and perspectives. His latest book The Globe on Paper: Writing Histories of the World in Renaissance Europe and the Americas (2020) traces how overseas exploration transformed historical writing across the Atlantic and beyond. He is currently completing the first monograph on the Lisbon massacre of 1506 and collaborating with Professor Jorge Flores (University of Lisbon) on a book project about visual dissent in Iberian colonial society.

——–

February 6th Seminar

Mirages of Digital Access and the Shaping of History

Rebecca Nedostup, History, Brown

For historians and scholars in numerous other fields, inquiry rests at least as much on access to new sources as on formulating new approaches to known sources. What are the implications for data science and for historical practice when digital repositories do not reflect the full diversity of the materials scholars have come to depend on to advance knowledge? This talk will draw on the field of modern Chinese history, where for reasons of privacy and politics digital access to archives and other key materials is uneven. I’ll discuss some implications for data-driven research, for teaching, and for the general understanding of a diverse historical past.

Rebecca Nedostup is a historian of twentieth-century China and Taiwan in the Departments of History and East Asian Studies at Brown. She works on displacement and emplacement; the social and political roles of the living and the dead in times of disruption; and the relationship of transitional justice and historical consciousness. More broadly, she is interested in ritual studies, historic preservation, critical archive studies, and digital ontologies. Between 2015 and 2019 she worked with Maura Dykstra (Yale) and other collaborators on Magpie, a project exploring the ethics and methods of creating digital records of research materials that are inconsistently digitized or not at all, subject to access barriers, or simply left on the cutting-room floor as part of the scholarly process. She is currently faculty director of the Choices program.

Data Matters is intended to stimulate conversations and collaboration by bringing multiple perspectives to challenging data-driven problems and talks are structured to be more of an interactive experience than traditional academic seminars. Data Matters includes scholars with backgrounds in the physical, biological, computational, and social sciences who share their perspectives on why data matters.

Held on select Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3:00pm at the Data Science Institute. Light refreshments will be provided.

This academic conference set into question contemporary conflations of Judaism and Zionism by exploring a rainbow of non-Zionist Jewish traditions throughout recent history and across different regions. Speakers at the conference addressed the changing relation to Zionism and the State of Israel in various Orthodox communities, in socialist and communist Jewish traditions, in the U.S. and Europe, among Ottoman and Arab Jews critical of the Zionist idea before 1948, among those who refused to immigrate to Israel or who lived there as dissidents, and among disillusioned Zionists in Israel and abroad. Together they gave an account of the spectrum of non-Zionist forms of Jewish thinking, activism, and organizing in their historical, ideological, theological, and theoretical contexts.

Speakers and Moderators

• Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (Brown University)
• Aslı Ü. Bâli (Yale Law School)
• Omer Bartov (Brown University)
• Orit Bashkin (University of Chicago)
• Daniel Boyarin (University of California, Berkeley)
• Jonathan Boyarin (Cornell University)
• Michelle Campos (Penn State University)
• Holly Case (Brown University)
• Mari Cohen (Jewish Currents)
• Beshara Doumani (Brown University)
• Sarah Hammerschlag (University of Chicago)
• Jonathan Judaken (Washington University, St. Louis)
• Geoffrey Levin (Emory University)
• Shaul Magid (Harvard Divinity School)
• Harry Merritt (University of Vermont)
• David Myers (University of California, Los Angeles)
• Adi M. Ophir (Brown University)
• Maru Pabón (Brown University)
• Michael Steinberg (Brown University)
• Peter Szendy (Brown University)
• Max Weiss (Princeton University)

The event was cosponsored by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, the Departments of History and Religious Studies, and the Center for Middle East Studies. It is convened by Omer Bartov, Holly Case, Shaul Magid, Adi M. Ophir, and Peter Szendy.

Tara A. Bynum (University of Iowa) will present her book Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America (University of Illinois Press, 2023) as part of the series JCB Reads, a hybrid event opportunity for former fellows to share their recent book publications with the JCB community.

Use the link https://brown.zoom.us/j/96148128870 to join the webinar!

This installment of JCB Reads will be virtual, but we plan to host hybrid (both virtual and in-person) events in the coming months!

This academic conference set into question contemporary conflations of Judaism and Zionism by exploring a rainbow of non-Zionist Jewish traditions throughout recent history and across different regions. Speakers at the conference addressed the changing relation to Zionism and the State of Israel in various Orthodox communities, in socialist and communist Jewish traditions, in the U.S. and Europe, among Ottoman and Arab Jews critical of the Zionist idea before 1948, among those who refused to immigrate to Israel or who lived there as dissidents, and among disillusioned Zionists in Israel and abroad. Together they gave an account of the spectrum of non-Zionist forms of Jewish thinking, activism, and organizing in their historical, ideological, theological, and theoretical contexts.

Speakers and Moderators

• Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (Brown University)
• Aslı Ü. Bâli (Yale Law School)
• Omer Bartov (Brown University)
• Orit Bashkin (University of Chicago)
• Daniel Boyarin (University of California, Berkeley)
• Jonathan Boyarin (Cornell University)
• Michelle Campos (Penn State University)
• Holly Case (Brown University)
• Mari Cohen (Jewish Currents)
• Beshara Doumani (Brown University)
• Sarah Hammerschlag (University of Chicago)
• Jonathan Judaken (Washington University, St. Louis)
• Geoffrey Levin (Emory University)
• Shaul Magid (Harvard Divinity School)
• Harry Merritt (University of Vermont)
• David Myers (University of California, Los Angeles)
• Adi M. Ophir (Brown University)
• Maru Pabón (Brown University)
• Michael Steinberg (Brown University)
• Peter Szendy (Brown University)
• Max Weiss (Princeton University)

The event was cosponsored by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, the Departments of History and Religious Studies, and the Center for Middle East Studies. It was convened by Omer Bartov, Holly Case, Shaul Magid, Adi M. Ophir, and Peter Szendy.

In December 2024, the reign of the Assad regime came to an end in Syria. This discussion with Joshua Landis will address the challenges facing Syrians in the coming years, as they seek to rebuild their country after 13 years of civil war and 53 years of authoritarian rule. Topics to include: the fears of communal violence; the spectres of Al Qaeda and ISIS; Syria’s relationships with Russia, Iran, and the Arab states; and the role of the international community.

About the panel:

Joshua Landis is Sandra Mackey Chair and Director of the Center for Middle East Studies and the Farzaneh Family Center for Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies at the University of Oklahoma in the Boren College of International Studies. He writes and manages SyriaComment.com, a daily newsletter on Syrian politics and publishes frequently in policy journals such as Foreign Affairs, Middle East Policy and Foreign Policy. His book, “Syria at Independence: Nationalism, Leadership, and Failure of Republicanism”, will be published by the Arab Center for Research and Policy studies this coming year. He is a frequent analyst on TV, radio, and in print and is a regular on NPR and the BBC.

Elias Muhanna is associate professor of comparative literature and history, and director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University. He is a scholar of medieval and early modern Islamic history, and also publishes commentary on modern Middle Eastern politics and culture in the mainstream press. He has written for The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Times, The Nation, and other periodicals.

Nina Tannenwald is senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science. Her research focuses on the role of international institutions, norms and ideas in global security issues, efforts to control weapons of mass destruction, and human rights and the laws of war. Her book, “The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Nonuse of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945” (Cambridge University Press, 2007), won the 2009 Lepgold Prize for best book in international relations.

Cosponsor:

The Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies

Made possible by the Peter Green Lectureship Fund on the Modern Middle East

This lecture considers the role of the dead in the historical study of Black religion. In the lecture, scholar Ahmad Greene-Hayes embraces viscerality and archival mediumship as modes of interpretation of the archival ancestor, to reckon with the how and why behind historical approaches in the study of Black religion and culture in the afterlife of slavery. In so doing, he focuses in on the interventions and mapping strategies of one archival ancestor from the early 20th century: Robert Athlyi Rogers, the founder of the United Home and Bank of the Negroes and the Afro-Athlican Constructive Church.

Greene-Hayes provides a critical examination of Rogers’ “The Negro Map of Life” (1917) and his self-constructed mapping practice to show how his religious and political orientations contributed to his production of an otherworldly cartography of Black religion in the early 20th century. In so doing, Greene-Hayes thinks with Rogers as both archivist and archival subject and theorizes how his methods of interpretation might be instructive for contemporary scholars.

This keynote lecture concludes the conference “Tending the Gap: Storytelling as Archival Method,” which builds on the Collaborative Humanities seminar “Archive Theory: Imagining Absence Otherwise.”

Free and open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.

About the Speaker

Ahmad Greene-Hayes is an assistant professor of African American religious studies at Harvard Divinity School and a member of the Standing Committee for the Study of Religion and the Standing Committee on Advanced Degrees in American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. His research interests include critical Black studies, Black Atlantic religions in the Americas, and race, queerness, and sexuality in the context of African American and Caribbean religious histories. He is the author of Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion-Making in Jim Crow New Orleans (University of Chicago Press, 2025). He has published essays in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Africana Religions, Nova Religio, GLQ, and the Journal of African American History, among others. He has held fellowships from Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music and LGBT studies program, the American Society of Church History, and Princeton’s “The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures,” to name a few. In 2022, he was inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College, and in 2023, he was inducted into the historic Society for the Study of Black Religion.

What does it mean to work through archival silences? What archival methods are necessary to tend to the gaps? Building on the Collaborative Humanities seminar “Archive Theory: Imagining Absence Otherwise,” this symposium showcases research that considers the methods, contradictions, and possibilities of archival studies.

The symposium brings together an interdisciplinary set of projects on a range of topics, including: reading with and alongside ephemera, coloniality and institutional power, artistic responses to archival materials, embracing methodological failures, and the beauty of storytelling and personal archives, among others. Each speaker will complicate the assumptions of the “gaps” and “losses” in the archive in search for other modes of thinking with and alongside a range of archival artifacts.

Free and open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.

Speakers

Presenters:

• Justina Blanco (Africana Studies)
• Alexander Chun (American Studies)
• Macie Clerkley (Anthropology)
• Brian Dang (Theatre Arts and Performance Studies)
• Nélari Figueroa Torres (Africana Studies, English)
• Jordan Good (Music)
• Erin Hardnett (History)
• Amber Hawk Swanson (Theatre Arts and Performance Studies)
• Brooke Johnson (Africana Studies)
• Lucas Joshi (Comparative Literature)
• Joyce Matos (Modern Culture and Media)
• Claudia Ojeda Rexach (History)
• Gery Vargas (RISD)
• Shuang Wang (Music)
• K Yin (American Studies)

Moderators/Hosts:

• Kiana Murphy (American Studies)
• Alejandra Rosenberg Navarro (Hispanic Studies)

Schedule

Image: A piece of art that has been altered to look like a collage, Heather Green, 2003

This is the keynote lecture for the workshop “Labor and the Global South: Concepts, Theories, and Histories.” Please note that a reception will follow the event. 

Watch the event recording here

How is the ‘Global South’ conceptualized within Global Labor History, and what tensions arise from this framing? In what ways does a focus on locally grounded labor histories challenge and expand our understanding of global processes? To what extent has Global Labor History’s global orientation influenced its connection to public engagement? This talk explores these questions by examining three foundational elements of global labor history—global, labor, and history—focusing on how each shapes the discipline’s boundaries, assumptions, and potential exclusions, particularly at its margins. First, it interrogates the concept of the Global South within Global Labor History, highlighting its lack of clear conceptualization and the tension it creates between global narratives and more localized research. This tension is explored through the lens of scope and scale, a theme that runs throughout the talk. Turning to “labor,” the discussion challenges Global Labor History’s predominant focus on migration and movement by incorporating place-based labor into the conversation, offering new insights into global labor dynamics and reshaping our understanding of “the global” in relation to fixed, local scales. Finally, the talk examines the connection between Global Labor History and public history, reflecting on the gap between theoretical frameworks of Global Labor History and its practical engagement with the public, particularly in terms of how labor histories are communicated and understood outside academic spaces.

Speaker bio: Görkem Akgöz is a research fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, specializing in global labor history, political economy, and women and gender history. She is the author of In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building and Working-Class Politics in Turkey (2024) and recently published a review dossier examining digital labor through the lens of labor history. She also serves on the Editorial Committee of the International Review of Social History.

Struggling to write your history final? Got writer’s block? Join the History DUG and the Writing Center tomorrow, Tuesday, December 3 for the History Essay Workshop between 4-6PM at Sharpe House, Room 125!

Pop in any time to grab a donut and hot chocolate, improve your writing, ask for advice on your final, talk about your writing with other students, and learn what your history professors are looking for in a good paper. We’re excited to see what you’re working on!

Join us as the John Carter Brown Library and the Brown History Department present Professor Seth Rockman’s new book Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (Chicago University Press, 2024). Speakers will include Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University.

More information about the book is available at https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/author/R/S/au8153909.html.

This event is co-sponsored by the Brown History Department.

In most accounts of the post-1492 discoveries, scholars have assumed that while Europeans may have initially “confused” America with Asia, this confusion steadily and swiftly gave way to the realization that America was a New World: a fourth continent. Contrary to these expectations, this talk explores the ways in which America and Asia persistently mingled in the geographical and cultural imagination of early modern Europeans, for whom Mexico really was India, North America was an extension of China, and South America was populated by a variety of biblical and Asian sites: a way of thinking and understanding the world that persisted well into the seventeenth century. Conceptualizing an Amerasian continent brings into view a dynamic model of the world and of Europe’s place in it that was forgotten after the establishment of more recent Eurocentric colonialist narratives in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

About the Speaker

Liz Horodowich is professor and chair of the department of history at New Mexico State University. She teaches and researches early modern global history with a focus on sixteenth-century Italy and Venice. She is the author of five books, including most recently Amerasia (Zone Books, 2023), which she co-authored with the art historian Alexander Nagel.

In this two-part panel, three editors discussed careers in publishing and best strategies for getting your work into print. Professor of American Studies and Urban Studies Samuel Zipp moderated the conversation between Timothy Bartlett ’90, executive editor at St. Martin’s Press; Susan Ferber ’93, executive editor for American and world history at Oxford University Press; and John Palattella, an editor for the print and digital magazine The Point who previously served as poetry and literary editor for The Nation.

Speakers

Tim Bartlett ’90 is executive editor at St. Martin’s Press, where he acquires in a range of fields including narrative nonfiction, history, current affairs, memoir, and idea-driven business. He worked previously at Basic Books, the Random House imprint of Penguin Random House, and Oxford University Press. He has, over the course of his career, specialized in helping academics write for a general audience. He graduated from Brown University with a concentration in history.

Susan Ferber ’93 is an executive editor for American and World history at Oxford University Press USA. Her list ranges from ancient to contemporary history and includes both academic and trade titles. Books she has edited have been national bestsellers and won numerous prizes, including the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Since 2005, she has taught at the Columbia Publishing Course in New York and Oxford. While at Brown University, she designed an independent concentration in Victorian and Edwardian Studies and took a leave of absence to study at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford.

John Palattella is an editor at The Point, a print and digital magazine of philosophical writing. He has been an editor at Lingua Franca, the Columbia Journalism Review, and The Nation, where he served as poetry editor for two years  and then as literary editor for nine. He has written for The Boston Review, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, The Point, and Wespennest (Austria), among others. He co-edited Into the Abyss: An Oral History of Reporting from Iraq, 2003–2006 (Melville House, 2007), and has contributed poems to Raritan. He earned a Ph.D. in English and American literature from the University of Rochester.

Presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and the Department of History.

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November 19th Seminar

AI and Humanities Research

Tara Nummedal (History, Brown) and Ashley Champagne (Center for Digital Scholarship, Brown)

The Center for Digital Scholarship is working with faculty to experiment with Artificial Intelligence for their research in the humanities. This talk will share some of those experiments and why the humanities are critical in conversations about AI.

Tara Nummedal is a Professor of History at Brown. She is the author of Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). She is Past President of the New England Renaissance Conference and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Modern History and Ambix. She teaches courses in early modern European history and the history of science.

Ashley Champagne is Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS), the University’s digital scholarship hub that provides inspiration, expertise, services, and teaching in digital scholarship methodologies, project development, and publication. She is also a Cogut Institute Lecturer in Humanities teaching courses in digital humanities. She is the PI of the “New Frameworks to Preserve and Publish Born-Digital Art,” a project funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, and the co-Research Director on the “Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas” project, which is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Data Matters is intended to stimulate conversations and collaboration by bringing multiple perspectives to challenging data-driven problems and talks are structured to be more of an interactive experience than traditional academic seminars. Data Matters includes scholars with backgrounds in the physical, biological, computational, and social sciences who share their perspectives on why data matters.

Held on select Tuesdays at 3:00pm at the Data Science Institute. Light refreshments will be provided.

About the Event
This talk draws on Prof. Mostafa Minawi’s latest book , Losing Istanbul: Arab-Ottoman Imperialist and the End of Empire (Stanford University Press), which offers an intimate history of the empire following the rise and fall of a generation of Arab-Ottoman imperialists living in Istanbul. He shows how these men and women negotiated their loyalties and guarded their privileges through a microhistorical study of the changing social, political, and cultural currents between 1878 and the First World War. He invites us to reconsider current tragedies in the Middle East and the massive population displacement in Syria, Turkey, and Palestine in the context of a long multi-cultural history of intimacies amongst the regions’ populations who converged in the former imperial capital, Istanbul.

Drawing on archival records, newspaper articles, travelogues, personal letters, diaries, photos, and interviews, Losing Istanbulshows how the loyalties of these imperialists were questioned and their ethnic identification weaponized. As the once diverse empire comes to an end, they are forced to give up their home in the imperial capital. An alternative history of the last four decades of the Ottoman Empire, Losing Istanbulframes global pivotal events through the experiences of Arab-Ottoman imperial loyalists who called Istanbul home, on the eve of a vanishing imperial world order.

About the Speaker
Mostafa Minawi is an associate professor of history and the director of Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies at Cornell University. His first book, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy from the Sahara to the Hijaz (Stanford University Press, 2016), was translated into Turkish and Arabic, and his latest, Losing Istanbul, was the co-winner of the Albert Hourani Book Prize in 2023 and was translated to Turkish and is currently being translated to Arabic. He works on questions of imperialism, race, and belonging in Ottoman spaces from Istanbul to the Horn of Africa. He is currently a fellow at the National Humanities Center, working on his latest project on Ottoman-Ethiopian relations in the context of intensified inter-imperial competition in the Horn of Africa.

Host and moderator:
Faiz Ahmed is the Joukowsky Family Distinguished Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Brown University. He specializes in the late Ottoman Empire, legal and constitutional history, and the historical interconnectivity of modern world regions, from the Middle East and South Asia to the Americas.

Jennifer Johnson is an Associate Professor of History at Brown University. Her research and teaching focus on the Maghreb, decolonization, state building, public health, gender and modern African History.

Cosponsors
Department of History

Made Possible by the Peter Green Lectureship Fund on the Modern Middle East

The Brown Departments of Classics and Hispanic Studies cordially invite you to join us for the presentation of Professor Andrew Laird’s new book Aztec Latin: Renaissance Learning and Nahuatl Traditions in Early Colonial Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2024), hosted by the John Carter Brown Library.

There will be comments from Louise Burkhart, Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Albany, SUNY, and David A. Lupher, Professor of Classics, Emeritus, University of Puget Sound. Professor Jeremy Mumford, Brown Department of History, will chair the event.

In 1536, only fifteen years after the fall of the Aztec empire, Franciscan missionaries began teaching Latin, classical rhetoric, and Aristotelian philosophy to native youths in central Mexico. The remarkable linguistic and cultural exchanges that would result from that initiative are the subject of this book. Aztec Latin highlights the importance of Renaissance humanist education for early colonial indigenous history, showing how practices central to humanism — the cultivation of eloquence, the training of leaders, scholarly translation, and antiquarian research — were transformed in New Spain to serve Indian elites as well as the Spanish authorities and religious orders.

While Franciscan friars, inspired by Erasmus’ ideal of a common tongue, applied principles of Latin grammar to Amerindian languages, native scholars translated the Gospels, a range of devotional literature, and even Aesop’s fables into the Mexican language of Nahuatl. They also produced significant new writings in Latin and Nahuatl, adorning accounts of their ancestral past with parallels from Greek and Roman history and importing themes from classical and Christian sources to interpret pre-Hispanic customs and beliefs. Aztec Latin reveals the full extent to which the first Mexican authors mastered and made use of European learning and provides a timely reassessment of what those indigenous authors really achieved.

The author of Aztec Latin, Andrew Laird, is the John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities, Professor of Hispanic Studies.

This event is free and open to the public, reception to follow. We look forward to seeing you there!

Recent years have witnessed a growing affinity between increasingly radicalized right-wing movements in the United States and Russia. In the book Illiberal Vanguard: Populist Elitism in the United States and Russia, Alexandar Mihailovic untangles this confluence, considering ethnonationalist movements in both countries and their parallel approaches to gender, race, and performative identity. He raises questions such as: How and why are radical right-wing movements developing along such similar trajectories in two nominally oppositional countries? How do religious sectarianism, the construction of whiteness, and institutionalized homophobia support each other in this transnational, informal but powerful allegiance? Prof. Mihailovic will address some of these topics in a lecture entitled “Elective Affinities: The Rise of American and Russian Illiberalism.”

Join the Department of History as we celebrate the launch of Jennifer Lambe’s new book, The Subject of Revolution: Between Political and Popular Culture in Cuba (University of North Carolina Press, 2024). A reception will take place at 79 Brown Street following the event. 

About the book: From television to travel bans, geopolitics to popular dance, The Subject of Revolution explores how knowledge about the 1959 Cuban Revolution was produced and how the Revolution in turn shaped new worldviews. Drawing on sources from over twenty archives as well as film, music, theater, and material culture, this book traces the consolidation of the Revolution over two decades in the interface between political and popular culture. The “subject of Revolution,” it proposes, should be understood as the evolving synthesis of the imaginaries constructed by its many “subjects,” including revolutionary leaders, activists, academics, and ordinary people within and beyond the island’s borders.

About the Event
Historian Max Deardorff will speak on “The Lure of the City: Muisca, Inca, and Yanacona Settlers in Post-Conquest Colombia.”

About the Speaker
Max Deardorff is assistant professor of history at the University of Florida. In his first book, “A Tale of Two Granadas: Custom, Community, and Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, 1568-1668” (Cambridge University Press, 2023), he conducted a comparative study focusing on new imperial subjects seeking enfranchisement in frontier towns and cities of two provinces of the far-flung Spanish monarchy: Granada in Spain’s formerly Islamic south, and New Granada, a northern Andean colony in the mountains of modern-day Colombia that was home to the Muisca people. His study of indigenous legal activism in the face of the expansion of the Christian monarchy revealed dynamic frontier politics of both conflict and accommodation. The book’s focus on the contested integration between natives and settlers also provided an opportunity to examine the relationship between emergent early modern categories of race–expressed through the notion of “blood purity” (limpieza de sangre)—and conceptions of “citizenship” in the sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish Empire.

A Tale of Two Granadas was awarded both the Bandelier/Lavrin Book Prize in Colonial Latin American History from the Rocky Mountain Conference in Latin American Studies and the Alfred B. Thomas Book Award from the Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies. Articles based on this project have appeared in a variety of venues, including Ethnohistory, the Journal of Family History, and Rechtsgeschichte-Legal History. The article “The Ties that Bind” received the triennial prize for “best early career article” in any period of Iberian history from the Association for Spanish & Portuguese Historical Studies (ASPHS).

Deardorff’s subsequent book project focuses on the history of the convicts and slaves impressed into service in the navies of the Spanish Empire and stationed in colonial cities in the Caribbean and Pacific to fight off pirates and contraband traders. A cultural history, the book details the life of unfree oarsmen both onboard the king’s galleys and ashore in New World port cities.

Deardorff is a former fellow at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt, Germany, a Fulbright Scholar, and a University Term Professor. His research has received funding from the Mellon Foundation, the Nanovic Institute, and the Kellogg Institute. He has lectured widely on my research in Colombia, Brazil, Peru, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and across the US.

 See Photos from all Fall 2024 Lunch Talks

Join the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice for an Emerging Scholars lunch talk with Dr. Frances Bell.

Between 1791 and 1810, approximately 20,000 people arrived in the United States from colonial Saint-Domingue, fleeing the events that would become known as the Haitian Revolution. Of these, an estimated ¼ were classified as enslaved upon their arrival. While enslavers often used this migration to reinscribe the status of the people whom they enslaved, many enslaved Saint-Dominguans contested their status in the U.S., both by invoking French, Haitian, and U.S. legalities of slavery and citizenship; and by seizing control over their own mobility. This talk traces their journeys from revolutionary Saint-Domingue to the United States to examine how mobility and legal status intersected in the Haitian Revolutionary Atlantic World.

Frances Bell is a Visiting Assistant Professor in History at Bates College, where she teaches courses in Atlantic and U.S. history. Her research focuses on the intersection between mobility and the legalities of slavery in the Haitian Revolutionary Atlantic world. Her current book project, In a State of Flight: Mobility, Freedom, and the Law in the Haitian Revolutionary Diaspora, 1791-1830, explores this intersection through the lives of enslaved and formerly enslaved people who traveled from revolutionary Saint-Domingue to the United States. Her work has been supported by the Carter G. Woodson Institute, Folger Institute, and Omohundro Institute, and is published and forthcoming in the Selected Papers of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era and the Journal of the Early Republic.

See Photos from the Event

Join award-winning historian, Professor Robin Bernstein (Harvard University), for a discussion about her new book, The Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit. It’s a gripping, morally complicated story of murder, greed, race, and the true origins of prison for profit. Prof. Bernstein will be in conversation with Prof. Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, Mass Incarceration and Punishment in America Research Cluster Faculty Fellow at the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice.

Following the event will be book sales and light refreshments.

Robin Bernstein is a cultural historian who focuses on race and performance from the nineteenth century to the present. She is the author of Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, as well as Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, which won five awards. Currently the Chair of the Program in American Studies, Bernstein teaches in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Program in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. She recently won Harvard’s Everett Mendelsohn Award for excellence in mentoring. Find her online at robinbernsteinphd.com or @robinmbernstein.

This conversation is a part of the Mass Incarceration and Punishment in America Research Cluster and is made possible by the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice’s Mass Incarceration and Carceral State Projects fund and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America.