Happening @ Michigan https://events.umich.edu/group/2935/rss RSS Feed for Happening @ Michigan Events at the University of Michigan. EIHS Lecture: Memories of Iconoclasm and Violence in Indigenous Accounts of the “Conquest” of Mexico (March 21, 2024 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/108409 108409-21819551@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, March 21, 2024 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

The history of the conquest of Mexico has often been told from the perspective of Spanish conquerors, but indigenous accounts reveal a contested history. This paper analyzes Nahuatl-language (Aztec) alphabetic writings and images produced by Nahua artists to shed light on indigenous memories of iconoclasm and violence in colonial Mexico. Special attention will be paid to understanding the significance of ritual objects, elite regalia, and sacred sites, and the impact that their destruction had on Nahua collective memory. This paper argues that Nahuas associated the destruction of their material culture with violence against native bodies and psychological trauma.

Lisa Sousa is a professor of history at Occidental College in Los Angeles who specializes in colonial Latin America, indigenous peoples of Mexico, and women, gender and sexuality. She is the author of The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women from Archives of Colonial Mexico, and co-translator and co-editor of The Story of Guadalupe: Luis Laso de la Vega’s Huei Tlamahuiçoltica of 1649 and Mesoamerican Voices: Native-Language Writings from Colonial Mexico, Oaxaca, Yucatan, and Guatemala. Her current project examines iconoclasm and violence in sixteenth-century Mexico.

This event presented by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 04 Dec 2023 16:47:12 -0500 2024-03-21T16:00:00-04:00 2024-03-21T18:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Lisa Sousa
EIHS Workshop: Rethinking Gender, Sexuality, and Colonialism (March 22, 2024 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/108419 108419-21819561@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 22, 2024 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

For decades, historians of gender and sexuality have produced rich scholarship that analyzes how sex, sexuality, and gender are inextricably interconnected with social, political and ideological power structures. Yet, in what seems unintentional, the voices, memories and experiences of many indigenous actors who do not fit the accepted gender categories in these histories are silenced. In this panel, graduate students consider ways scholars can broaden the meaning of “gender and sexuality relations” to include the many forms of relationships involving colonial powers operating in and among indigenous peoples and communities around the globe.

Rachael Barrett (Graduate Student, History and Women's & Gender Studies, University of Michigan)
Augusto Espinoza (Graduate Student, History, University of Michigan)
Irene Mora (Graduate Student, History and Women's & Gender Studies, University of Michigan)
Sueann Caulfield (moderator, Professor, History, University of Michigan)

This event presented by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.

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Workshop / Seminar Thu, 14 Mar 2024 08:52:38 -0400 2024-03-22T12:00:00-04:00 2024-03-22T14:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop / Seminar Elton Monroy Durán, Plaza del Norte Mural, Mexicantown, Detroit.
Science Studies After Historical Epistemology (March 28, 2024 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/118591 118591-21841251@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, March 28, 2024 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Science matters. Over the last half-century, a field—called science studies—has emerged to explain why. Science studies accounts for science’s remarkable authority in many ways, calling attention to techniques of persuasion, regimes of labor, and forms of materiality that underwrite science’s power and practice. Uniting this diverse range of scholarly approaches is a focus on “knowledge.” Since the 1980s, scholars of science studies have focused almost exclusively on the production, circulation, and contestation of knowledge. Knowledge has retained this priority even as its basic categories—objectivity and proof, trust and truth—have come in for historical and social analysis. Science’s importance, in other words, is rooted in its ways of knowing.

This workshop looks beyond “knowledge” for alternative categories and concepts at the edges of science studies. Leading scholars will present a range of critical terms as possible futures for science studies, questioning the identification of “science” and “knowledge” that was cemented with the rise of “historical epistemology” over the last few decades. Drawing on theoretical turns in fields near and far, we will consider the possibility of a science studies centered on roots and vibrations, habits and beliefs, the sacred and the type. The workshop remains committed to the idea that science matters; what participants are after is a new account (or accounts) of why, new frameworks within which old binaries fade from view and new political possibilities emerge.

Join us on March 28 at 4:00 pm in 1014 Tisch Hall for the public event.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 07 Feb 2024 15:24:29 -0500 2024-03-28T16:00:00-04:00 2024-03-28T17:30:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop / Seminar Conference artwork
EIHS Lecture: Promissory Talk and the Limits of Historical Imagination (April 4, 2024 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/108410 108410-21819552@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, April 4, 2024 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

This lecture uses the concept of promissory talk to critically analyze one way of thinking “against history.” Promissory talk is a future-oriented version of counterfactual speculation. Rather than asking “what if…?” questions of historical events when the outcomes are already known, promissory speech says “if only… then…” as a way of linking present policy actions to anticipated future results. Drawing on examples from Japan and the United States, Professor Thomas will show how recent efforts to reframe children’s historical consciousness reflect a dubious promissory premise: “If only the kids had more national pride, then all of our problems would be solved."

Jolyon Baraka Thomas is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2012). Thomas’s current research projects include the monograph Difficult Subjects: Religion and the Politics of Public Education under the US-Japan Security Alliance, a co-authored book called Animating Action, and the co-edited New Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions.

This event presented by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 09 Jan 2024 15:59:14 -0500 2024-04-04T16:00:00-04:00 2024-04-04T18:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Jolyon Baraka Thomas
EIHS Workshop: The Media of History (April 5, 2024 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/108420 108420-21819562@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 5, 2024 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Abstract forthcoming.

Tori Herzig-Deribin (Graduate Student, History, University of Michigan)
John Mirsky (Graduate Student, Sociology, University of Michigan)
Kristi Rhead (Graduate Student, Anthropology and History, University of Michigan)
Helmut Puff (moderator, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Collegiate Professor of History and Germanic Languages, University of Michigan)

This event presented by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 21 Feb 2024 11:34:06 -0500 2024-04-05T12:00:00-04:00 2024-04-05T14:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop / Seminar Tisch Hall
EIHS Public Lecture: “Species Insurance”: Harriet Tubman, Environmental Storytelling, and Historical Modes of Survival (April 11, 2024 6:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/119386 119386-21842656@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, April 11, 2024 6:00pm
Location: Michigan League
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Format: Lecture followed by book signing with light refreshments. Literati Bookstore will sell copies of Professor Miles's book.

Abstract: Borrowing the words of Octavia E. Butler for theoretical inspiration, this talk engages in a thought experiment. What if we were to take Harriet Tubman, one of the most famous historical figures in the US, and center her in an environmental story? What would we learn about Tubman herself? What would we notice about Black women in the nineteenth century and the role of place and ecology in their survival? And what connections might we draw between Black women’s environmental thinking in the multi-temporal past and the greatest challenges facing our species in the murky present and future?

Biography: Tiya Miles is the author of seven books, including four prize-winning studies on the history of American slavery. Her works include the National Book Award winner, All That She Carried, The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake; Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation; The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits, and Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, among others. She has written prize-winning historical fiction: The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts, shared her travels to "haunted" historic sites of slavery in a published lecture series, and written various articles and op-eds (in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, CNN.com, and more) on women’s history, history and memory, Black public culture, and Black and Indigenous interrelated experience. Miles’s forthcoming book, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People, will be published by Penguin Press in June. Miles taught on the faculty of the University of Michigan for sixteen years and is currently the Michael Garvey Professor of History at Harvard University. Her work has been supported by the MacArthur Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This event presented by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg. Additional support from the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies.

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 06 Mar 2024 12:20:45 -0500 2024-04-11T18:00:00-04:00 2024-04-11T20:00:00-04:00 Michigan League Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Tiya Miles, Harvard University
IHP-EIHS Symposium: Approaches to Oral History and the Work of Inclusive History (April 19, 2024 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/108414 108414-21819556@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 19, 2024 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Abstract forthcoming.

Camron Michael Amin (Professor of Middle East and Iranian Diaspora Studies, Department of Social Sciences, University of Michigan-Dearborn)
Alexis A. Antracoli (Director, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor)
Lorena Chambers (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Inclusive History Project, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor)
Jay Cook (moderator; Professor, Department of History; Director of Research, Inclusive History Project; University of Michigan-Ann Arbor)

This event presented by the Inclusive History Project and the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.

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Conference / Symposium Mon, 18 Mar 2024 14:30:45 -0400 2024-04-19T12:00:00-04:00 2024-04-19T14:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Conference / Symposium IHP-EIHS Symposium: Approaches to Oral History and the Work of Inclusive History