Happening @ Michigan https://events.umich.edu/list/rss RSS Feed for Happening @ Michigan Events at the University of Michigan. EIHS Lecture: The Historian's Task in the Anthropocene: Theory and Practice (November 30, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/40915 40915-8828527@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, November 30, 2017 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Climate denialism comes in many forms. Most historians understand that the planet faces severe environmental challenges, yet few incorporate this new reality into their work or consider its impact on history as a discipline. In this talk, Julia Adeney Thomas explains why some scientists find “the Anthropocene” a compelling concept and explores the challenges posed by earth systems science to the discipline, particularly history’s political function. Finally, using an example from Japan, she proposes a new form of critical history as we move from modernity’s promise of freedom and development to the more modest goal of sustainability with decency.

Julia Adeney Thomas has written extensively about concepts of nature in political ideology, the challenge posed by climate change to the discipline of history, and photography as a political practice in Japan and globally. She is the recipient of the AHA’s John K. Fairbank Prize for Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology and of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians' Best Article of the Year Award for “Photography, National Identity, and the 'Cataract of Times:' Wartime Images and the Case of Japan” from the American Historical Review. Two collaborative books: Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power (with Ian J. Miller and Brett L. Walker) and Rethinking Historical Distance (with Mark Salber Phillips and Barbara Caine) have forwarded her interest in theory, history, and the environment. Currently, she is completing The Historian's Task in the Anthropocene as well as co-editing a collection on Visualizing Fascism: The Rise of the Global Right. Educated at Princeton, Oxford, and Chicago, she taught at the University of Illinois-Chicago and at the University of Wisconsin–Madison before joining Notre Dame’s history department.

Free and open to the public.

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

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 16 Nov 2017 11:38:48 -0500 2017-11-30T16:00:00-05:00 2017-11-30T18:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Julia Adeney Thomas
EIHS Workshop: Crossing Boundaries in Environmental History (December 1, 2017 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/41565 41565-9364969@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, December 1, 2017 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

How have various historical actors understood their embodied relationship with the environment? Reflecting on the scholarship of Julia Adeney Thomas—and particularly her essay, “Who is the ‘we’ endangered by climate change?”—our panel will consider this question and more from diverse historical perspectives. We will discuss Carolingian descriptions of climate change, Buddhist reincarnation in medieval Japan, as well as twentieth-century American and British literary depictions of polar landscapes. The panel will address some of the ways in which changes in the relationship between human bodies and their environments may alter our ability to establish historical continuity with people of the past.

Precirculated Paper: Thomas, Julia Adeney. (2016). Coda: Who is the 'we' endangered by climate change? In Fernando Vidal and Nélia Dias (Eds.), Endangerment, Biodiversity and Culture (pp. 241-260). London: Routledge.

To receive a copy of the precirculated paper for this workshop, please email eisenberginstitute@umich.edu or pick up a printed copy at the Eisenberg Institute (1521 Haven Hall).

Panelists include:
Esther Ladkau, PhD Student, History, University of Michigan
David Patterson, PhD Candidate, History, University of Michigan
Matthew Villeneuve, PhD Student, History, University of Michigan
Perrin Selcer, chair, Assistant Professor, History, University of Michigan
Julia Adeney Thomas, commentator, Associate Professor, History, University of Notre Dame

Free and open to the public. Lunch provided.

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

Image: "barbs002" (Robert Kash, CC BY 2.0)

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 20 Nov 2017 12:15:19 -0500 2017-12-01T12:00:00-05:00 2017-12-01T14:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop / Seminar barbed wire
Medieval Lunch. Expressive Gestures: Affect and Violence in the late 16th century Russian Illustrated Historical Chronicle (December 5, 2017 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/43706 43706-9832691@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, December 5, 2017 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS)

The Medieval Lunch Series is an informal program for sharing works-in-progress and fostering community among medievalists at the University of Michigan. Faculty and graduate students from across disciplines participate, sharing their research and discussing ongoing projects.

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Workshop / Seminar Thu, 07 Sep 2017 09:01:12 -0400 2017-12-05T12:00:00-05:00 2017-12-05T13:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) Workshop / Seminar Russian gesturing
Absinthe: World Literatures in Translation reading (December 8, 2017 3:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46887 46887-10667317@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, December 8, 2017 3:30pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Comparative Literature

The editors of Absinthe: World Literatures in Translation are pleased to invite you to the launch of our upcoming issue, "Unscripted: An Armenian Palimpsest." Please join us in celebrating this publication with a special reading in the Department of Comparative Literature.

Readers include Maral Aktokmakyan Erdogan, Meg Berkobien, Tamar Boyadjian, Dzovinar Derderian, Michael Pifer, Peter Vorissis.

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Presentation Wed, 06 Dec 2017 09:06:02 -0500 2017-12-08T15:30:00-05:00 2017-12-08T16:30:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Comparative Literature Presentation Armenian alphabet
STS Speaker. Dissonant Infrastructures: Tensions between Science and Public Health Embedded in Sickle Cell Disease in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil (December 11, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42861 42861-9672385@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, December 11, 2017 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Science, Technology & Society

Epistemic authority for knowledge production about sickle cell disease (SCD) in Brazil lay mostly at the feet of elite scientists associated with established institutions. These gatekeepers often focus on the biological and medical processes that take place within the body. SCD activists embedded in the public health infrastructure in Salvador, discursively deem the interest from scientists to be based in a paradigm that treats the person living with SCD as a commodity to clinical science. What occurs when social infrastructures that “emphasize the durability and permanence of social systems within which biomedical knowledge production and labor occur,” (Dent, 2016) are at odds with each other? What takes place when the social milieu of place erodes these infrastructures? This presentation will explore the ways in which activists in the municipal public health department for Salvador circumvent modes of elite knowledge production and reconfigure how SCD is defined by situating the discourse from “inside the body” to “outside” and from biological to cultural.

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 30 Aug 2017 14:10:11 -0400 2017-12-11T16:00:00-05:00 2017-12-11T17:30:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Science, Technology & Society Lecture / Discussion Melissa Creary
The Practice of History (December 14, 2017 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/47118 47118-10799200@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, December 14, 2017 2:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

Kathleen Canning’s work has transformed the way we do history and her indefatigable spirit has inspired scholars and students here at the University of Michigan and beyond. This symposium will bring together scholars whose work has been inspired by her writings and teaching and students whose careers she supported and shaped, with the purpose of marking her transition from the University of Michigan to Rice University, where she will serve as Dean of Humanities.

The Practice of History will feature a keynote lecture in Canning’s honor by Tracie Matysik (University of Texas, Austin) and bring together leading scholars, colleagues, and former students of Canning’s to reflect on her numerous contributions in four panels. In a first session, colleagues from Michigan and elsewhere will consider how Canning’s work has shaped the field of German History. A second session on Citizenship and Gender will engage with her most important historical and theoretical arguments to illustrate how they continue to transform historical understanding of categories such as gender, citizenship, experience, practice and participation. The third session, features some of Canning’s more recent former students who will comment on the key role her work and mentorship have played in their education, their development as scholars, and their current careers. The last session “Kathleen and the World” brings together scholars who work in non-European fields to reflect on the breadth and reach of Canning’s influence.

Besides celebrating the scholarship and educational vision of Kathleen Canning, The Practice of History also seeks to remind us all of the extraordinary citizen, colleague, mentor. and friend she has been to her Michigan students and colleagues as well as to scholars, thinkers, and activists elsewhere. Her work has never been purely abstract. Her labor has never been only theoretical. Her scholarship is marked most by its heartfelt connections to actual people and places, both in the now and in the past and driven by her deep commitment to activism, practice, empowerment, and enjoyment.

Thursday, December 14

Kathleen Canning and German History, 2:00 pm
Rita Chin (University of Michigan)
David Crew (University of Texas, Austin)
Atina Grossmann (Cooper Union)
Elizabeth Otto (SUNY Buffalo)
Chair: Warren Rosenblum (Webster University)

Keynote Lecture, 4:00 pm
Tracie Matysik (University of Texas, Austin)

Friday, December 15

Kathleen Canning, Citizenship, and Gender, 10:00 am
Kerstin Barndt (University of Michigan)
Kathy Bench (Baruch College, CUNY)
Marti Lybeck (University of Wisconsin, La Crosse)
Scott Spector (University of Michigan)
Chair: Josh Cole (University of Michigan)

Kathleen Canning as a Teacher and Mentor, 2:00 pm
Johannes von Moltke (University of Michigan)
Alice Goff (University of Chicago)
Ian McNeely (University of Oregon)
Ari Sammartino (Oberlin College)
Alice Weinreb (Loyola University Chicago)
Chair: Brian Porter-Szucs (University of Michigan)

Kathleen Canning and the World, 4:15 pm
Penny von Eschen (Cornell University)
Helmut Puff (University of Michigan)
Lora Wildenthal (Rice University)
Anne Berg (University of Michigan
Chair: Farina Mir (University of Michigan)

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Conference / Symposium Mon, 11 Dec 2017 13:21:52 -0500 2017-12-14T14:00:00-05:00 2017-12-14T18:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Conference / Symposium Kathleen Canning
The Practice of History (December 15, 2017 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/47118 47118-10799201@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, December 15, 2017 10:00am
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

Kathleen Canning’s work has transformed the way we do history and her indefatigable spirit has inspired scholars and students here at the University of Michigan and beyond. This symposium will bring together scholars whose work has been inspired by her writings and teaching and students whose careers she supported and shaped, with the purpose of marking her transition from the University of Michigan to Rice University, where she will serve as Dean of Humanities.

The Practice of History will feature a keynote lecture in Canning’s honor by Tracie Matysik (University of Texas, Austin) and bring together leading scholars, colleagues, and former students of Canning’s to reflect on her numerous contributions in four panels. In a first session, colleagues from Michigan and elsewhere will consider how Canning’s work has shaped the field of German History. A second session on Citizenship and Gender will engage with her most important historical and theoretical arguments to illustrate how they continue to transform historical understanding of categories such as gender, citizenship, experience, practice and participation. The third session, features some of Canning’s more recent former students who will comment on the key role her work and mentorship have played in their education, their development as scholars, and their current careers. The last session “Kathleen and the World” brings together scholars who work in non-European fields to reflect on the breadth and reach of Canning’s influence.

Besides celebrating the scholarship and educational vision of Kathleen Canning, The Practice of History also seeks to remind us all of the extraordinary citizen, colleague, mentor. and friend she has been to her Michigan students and colleagues as well as to scholars, thinkers, and activists elsewhere. Her work has never been purely abstract. Her labor has never been only theoretical. Her scholarship is marked most by its heartfelt connections to actual people and places, both in the now and in the past and driven by her deep commitment to activism, practice, empowerment, and enjoyment.

Thursday, December 14

Kathleen Canning and German History, 2:00 pm
Rita Chin (University of Michigan)
David Crew (University of Texas, Austin)
Atina Grossmann (Cooper Union)
Elizabeth Otto (SUNY Buffalo)
Chair: Warren Rosenblum (Webster University)

Keynote Lecture, 4:00 pm
Tracie Matysik (University of Texas, Austin)

Friday, December 15

Kathleen Canning, Citizenship, and Gender, 10:00 am
Kerstin Barndt (University of Michigan)
Kathy Bench (Baruch College, CUNY)
Marti Lybeck (University of Wisconsin, La Crosse)
Scott Spector (University of Michigan)
Chair: Josh Cole (University of Michigan)

Kathleen Canning as a Teacher and Mentor, 2:00 pm
Johannes von Moltke (University of Michigan)
Alice Goff (University of Chicago)
Ian McNeely (University of Oregon)
Ari Sammartino (Oberlin College)
Alice Weinreb (Loyola University Chicago)
Chair: Brian Porter-Szucs (University of Michigan)

Kathleen Canning and the World, 4:15 pm
Penny von Eschen (Cornell University)
Helmut Puff (University of Michigan)
Lora Wildenthal (Rice University)
Anne Berg (University of Michigan
Chair: Farina Mir (University of Michigan)

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Conference / Symposium Mon, 11 Dec 2017 13:21:52 -0500 2017-12-15T10:00:00-05:00 2017-12-15T18:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Conference / Symposium Kathleen Canning
Central Concepts in Contemporary Theory | General Interest Meeting (January 11, 2018 6:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48341 48341-11222710@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, January 11, 2018 6:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of English Language and Literature

The Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop Central Concepts in Contemporary Theory warmly welcomes all to attend a general interest meeting this upcoming Thursday, January 11 in 2024 Tisch Hall at 6pm.

This semester we will be exploring the concepts of tragedy and melancholia in both literature and contemporary critical theory. During Thursday's meeting we will overview the theme, readings, and schedule for the upcoming Winter 2018 term in greater depth as well as take suggestions from the group regarding further texts to be read and invited speakers.

Please feel free to circulate this notice to any and all who may be interested. And let either Megan Torti (mtorti@umich.edu) or Srdjan Cvjeticanin (srdjan@umich.edu) know if you've any questions in the interim. We look forward to seeing many of you there.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 08 Jan 2018 13:42:38 -0500 2018-01-11T18:00:00-05:00 2018-01-11T19:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Department of English Language and Literature Workshop / Seminar Tisch Hall
1968 + 50: Unfinished Legacies of Dr. King’s Last Year (January 15, 2018 1:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/47471 47471-10929750@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, January 15, 2018 1:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the speech “Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence.” Exactly one year later, he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had been supporting striking sanitation workers. The last year of King's life marked a distinctive period in his career as he allied himself with a broad array of initiatives linking civil rights with antiwar, labor, and antipoverty campaigns. This panel will consider the legacy of that year, stretching from the social justice movements of the late 1960s to causes today such as Black Lives Matter, immigrant rights, and attempts to reverse the growing gap of socioeconomic inequality.

Featuring:
Ruth Feldstein, Rutgers University-Newark
Monica Muñoz Martinez, Brown University
Brenda Tindal, Detroit Historical Society

Ruth Feldstein is professor of history and American studies at Rutgers University-Newark. She is the author of several books and articles, most recently the award-winning book, How It Feels To Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement; she is also associate producer of How It Feels to Be Free, a forthcoming documentary based on this book. Feldstein's scholarship explores relationships between race and gender relations, and between performance and politics; she works to tell the stories of women whose voices have not been heard, and who are seldom taken seriously as thinkers and activists.

Monica Muñoz Martinez, Carnegie Fellow 2017-2019, received her PhD in American studies from Yale University. At Brown University she offers courses in Latinx studies, immigration, histories of violence, histories of policing, and public memory in US History. Her research has been funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, the Brown University Office of Vice President of Research, and the Texas State Historical Association. Her first manuscript, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in the Texas Borderlands, is under contract with Harvard University Press. She is a faculty fellow at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. Martinez is the primary investigator for Mapping Violence, a digital project that documents histories of racial violence in Texas.

Public historian, archivist, curator, and educator Brenda Tindal joined the Detroit Historical Society as director of education in December 2017. She is the former staff historian and senior vice president of research and collections at Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, NC. In 2005, she was part of the curatorial team that developed Courage: The Carolina Story that Changed America, an exhibit on the region’s role in the landmark school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which won the National Award for Museum Service—the nation’s highest honor awarded to museums and libraries. Tindal recently co-curated the museum’s K(NO)W Justice K(NO)W Peace—a rapid-response exhibit that explores the historical roots of the distrust between police and community, tells the human stories beyond the headlines, and engages viewers in creating constructive solutions. Before joining the Levine Museum of the New South in 2015 as staff historian, Tindal was a visiting lecturer in the Department of History and Honors College at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, where she taught a broad range of courses in comparative U.S. and South African history, southern history, African American history, and visual and material culture. A sought after social commentator, convener, and speaker, Tindal has been featured on C-SPAN, the Knight Foundation’s Media Learning Seminar, Happenings Magazine, NPR, Pride Magazine, NBC-Today, The Charlotte Observer, and many other local and national news and media outlets.


Free and open to the public.

This event made possible by the Kalt Fund for African American and African History, along with the Department of History and the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.

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Conference / Symposium Mon, 08 Jan 2018 11:25:11 -0500 2018-01-15T13:00:00-05:00 2018-01-15T15:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Conference / Symposium Composite Image
Give Earth a Chance: Michigan in the World Online Exhibit Launch (January 26, 2018 1:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48586 48586-11254293@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, January 26, 2018 1:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

In March 1970, students at the University of Michigan organized a four-day teach-in, the precursor of the national Earth Day demonstration that April. The online exhibit “Give Earth a Chance” explores these pivotal events, including video interviews with key organizers, and reproduces more than four hundred archival documents and images from the Bentley Historical Library and Labadie Collection. The exhibit also chronicles the origins of the environmental movement in Michigan, the establishment of the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor, and other key developments in environmental activism and policymaking in the 1960s and 1970s.

Join students from Professor Matthew Lassiter’s fall 2017 History 399 course as they launch “Give Earth a Chance,” the latest installment of Michigan in the World, a public history collaboration between the Department of History and the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.

View other Michigan in the World projects and learn more about public history at U-M: https://lsa.umich.edu/history/public-history.html

Free and open to the public.

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Exhibition Fri, 12 Jan 2018 15:22:40 -0500 2018-01-26T13:00:00-05:00 2018-01-26T14:30:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Exhibition website screen capture
STS Speaker. The Matter of Black Lives: Hauntology, Infrastructure, and the Necropolitics of History in the American South (January 29, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/43476 43476-9771967@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, January 29, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Science, Technology & Society

In this talk I ask how scholars can deepen and expand, but also trouble, the field of hauntology. Originating in Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, the field of hauntology analyzes how hauntings, ghosts, and specters are distinct conceptual categories characterizing liminal social states, persons, and subjectivities, but also economic and political realities. I seek to ground (and critique) the field of hauntology empirically by analyzing how public infrastructure projects re/make race and history through both spectral and material practices. I draw on advocacy work in Charlottesville, Virginia, around preserving an ancestral cemetery threatened by a proposed federal transportation project to press a new argument on how the matter of Black lives plays out in contemporary American struggles for racial and environmental justice. The paper asks the following: Who or what specter has the capacity to “haunt,” and at what moments? What are the relationships between hauntings and the suppression of historical memory in the aftermath of collective traumatic events? What roles do the presence or absence of material evidence of the subaltern past—the remains of the dead, archival remnants, archaeological, and architectural artifacts, and documentary evidence of their value—play in these processes of political recognition, memory, and forgetting? In other words, what kinds of “necropolitics” (Mbembe 2003) govern the living and the dead, and their denial or commemoration?

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 08 Nov 2017 09:09:24 -0500 2018-01-29T16:00:00-05:00 2018-01-29T17:30:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Science, Technology & Society Lecture / Discussion Prof Erica James
Medieval Lunch. Notions of Race in Medieval Europe. (January 30, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48781 48781-11306111@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, January 30, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS)

Hussein Fancy, U-M History
"The Race of History and the History of Race in Spanish Medievalism"

Annika Pattenaude, U-M English Language & Literature
"'I don't think that I was even born then': A Case for 'Race' in the Fables of Marie de France"

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Workshop / Seminar Thu, 18 Jan 2018 15:14:20 -0500 2018-01-30T12:00:00-05:00 2018-01-30T13:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) Workshop / Seminar Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, ca. 1275-1300, MS 3142 fol. 256. Source: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b55003999w/f523.item
CANCELLED: EIHS Lecture: Private Parts and Public Concerns: Erecting the Modern Japanese Penis (February 1, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/40916 40916-8828528@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, February 1, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

In Japan and other places, modernity has given rise to what might be called a “penis industry”: a complex of urological knowledge, business interests, and advertising media that, by instilling a fear in impressionable young males that their genitalia embody a shameful departure from the physical norm, extracts money from their wallets to carry out one or another kind of treatment. This talk considers the emergence of the penis industry in early twentieth-century Japan, focusing on the advertising strategies that its entrepreneurs developed in print to promote a distinctly modern form of psychological anxiety.

Gregory Pflugfelder is an associate professor of Japanese history in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of History at Columbia University. Professor Pflugfelder's current work engages the construction of masculinities, the history of the body, and representations of monstrosity. His books include JAPANimals: History and Culture in Japan's Animal Life, coedited with Brett L. Walker (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, 2005); Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950 (University of California Press, 1999) and Politics and the Kitchen: A History of the Women's Suffrage Movement in Akita Prefecture (in Japanese; Domesu, 1986). His latest writing projects are "Growing Up with Godzilla: A Global History" and "Mobo: Playing the 'Modern Boy' in Interwar Japan and Its Empire." Professor Pflugfelder received his BA from Harvard (1981), his MA from Waseda (1984), and his PhD from Stanford (1996). He has been teaching at Columbia since 1996.

Free and open to the public.

This event is part of the Thursday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg with support from the Lesbian-Gay-Queer Research Initiative.

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 31 Jan 2018 08:36:43 -0500 2018-02-01T16:00:00-05:00 2018-02-01T18:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Pflugfelder
EIHS Workshop: Public/Private Selves: (In)visibilities, Identities, and Communities (February 2, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/47887 47887-11043645@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 2, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

This panel engages themes from Gregory Pflugfelder’s article “The Nation-State, the Age/Gender System, and the Reconstitution of Erotic Desire in Nineteenth-Century Japan.” Moving from late medieval Japan to colonial Lima and finally 1960-70s Italy, presenters discuss various ways in which material and visual signifiers shape personal and communal identities. Dr. Pflugfelder will provide a brief discussion of the article prior to presentations. Pre-reading is encouraged but not necessary. The article is available at: www.jstor.org/stable/23357429.

Featuring:

Gregory Pflugfelder (speaker; Associate Professor; East Asian Languages and Cultures, History; Columbia University)

Robert Morrissey (panelist; Graduate Student, History of Art, University of Michigan; "Dress and the Divine: Late Medieval Representations of Chigo Daishi")

Ximena Gómez (panelist; Graduate Student, History of Art, University of Michigan; "Caboverdes and Criollos: Confraternal Art and the (In)Visibility of Afroperuvian Ethnic Identity in Early Colonial Lima")

Alessio Ponzio (panelist; Graduate Student, History and Women's Studies, University of Michigan; "Ermanno Lavorini: How an Alleged Case of Pedophilia Galvanized Homophobia and Homosexual Self-awareness in 1969 Italy")

Hitomi Tonomura (chair; Professor; History, Women's Studies; University of Michigan)

Free and open to the public. Lunch provided.

Photo: "Memories from the invisible" (August Brill, CC BY 2.0).

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

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Workshop / Seminar Thu, 25 Jan 2018 11:14:10 -0500 2018-02-02T12:00:00-05:00 2018-02-02T14:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop / Seminar Workshop Graphic
Luminous Flesh: Aesthetics of Immobility in Tsai Ming Liang's Walker Series (February 6, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49226 49226-11397798@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, February 6, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Comparative Literature

Elizabeth Wijaya is a Ph.D candidate in Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She will given an overview of her book project, "Luminous Flesh," on the visible and invisible worlds of diasporic Chinese cinemas, and present a section on Taiwanese-Malaysian director Tsai Ming Liang's seven-part Walker Series.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 24 Jan 2018 13:07:22 -0500 2018-02-06T16:00:00-05:00 2018-02-06T17:30:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Comparative Literature Workshop / Seminar Tisch Hall
The Transnational Impact of the Black Panther Party (February 7, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49367 49367-11450941@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, February 7, 2018 3:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

This lecture is a study of groups in Great Britain, New Zealand, India, Australia, Israel, and Palestine that did not have any direct contact with the Black Panther Party but chose to create movements in their respective countries modeled after the Panthers’ grassroots community organizing and racial coalition strategies. All of these groups emulated the Black Panther Party because each group believed that their struggle as poor, underserved and oppressed people was aligned with the struggle of black people throughout the world. More importantly, the power of the liberation struggle led by the Black Panther Party in the US that impacted the struggles of poor and oppressed people in Europe, the South Pacific, the Middle East, and Asia has been understudied for far too long.

Jakobi Williams’ research interests are centered on questions of resistance and social justice revolutions found within the African American community. His most recent book, From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago, demonstrates that Chicago’s Black Power movement was both a response to and extension of the city’s civil rights movement. Williams is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities grant, the National Humanities Center Fellowship, and the Big Ten Academic Alliance-Academic Leadership Program.

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 29 Jan 2018 08:50:10 -0500 2018-02-07T15:00:00-05:00 2018-02-07T16:30:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Lecture / Discussion Dalit Panther of India
STS Speaker. Translating the Cell Biology of Aging? On the Importance of Choreographing Knowledge (February 12, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46008 46008-10353039@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, February 12, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Science, Technology & Society

This talk draws on ethnographic study in a cell biology of ageing laboratory that explored how the articulation between basic and clinical research is being crafted. I first describe how knowledge-making in the cell biology of ageing relies on two distinct epistemic and material cultures: visualisation and quantification. I argue that the focus on ‘mechanisms’, ‘biomarkers’ or ‘clinical translation’ is related to how uncertainty is distributed across the two sets of skills, instruments, repertoires of valuation, and types of objectivity. I suggest that funders and policy makers’ emphasis on innovative applications restricts the movement – the careful choreography – between these two epistemic cultures. This has consequences for the field's ability not only to re-open questions about the relationship between ageing and senescence but also to re-imagine the innovation regime for ‘aging society’.

Tiago Moreira is Professor of Sociology at Durham University (UK). In the last 15 years or so, he has researched and published on the role of evidence in health care and on public controversies and activism on health care standards. More recently, his research has focused on contemporary sociotechnical articulations between ageing and health.

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 25 Oct 2017 15:59:48 -0400 2018-02-12T16:00:00-05:00 2018-02-12T17:30:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Science, Technology & Society Lecture / Discussion Tisch Hall
Medieval Lunch. Medieval/Africa: Past and Potential (February 14, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48863 48863-11320058@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, February 14, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS)

Professor Jeppie will ask and explore: What are the possibilities of bringing common questions— common to European and African history— into a comparative discussion? Was there a medieval Africa, in the first place?

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 09 Feb 2018 12:30:13 -0500 2018-02-14T12:00:00-05:00 2018-02-14T13:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) Lecture / Discussion Timbuktu Manuscripts on Astronomy Mathematics (Public Domain). Source: https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/images/carousel-images/timbuktu-manuscripts-astronomy-mathematics.jpg/view
EIHS Lecture: "Combee": Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Transformation in Gullah Geechee Identity (February 15, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/40917 40917-8828529@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, February 15, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

"Combee" interprets on a unique compilation of primary historical sources, which show how localized groups who stole their freedom from Combahee rice plantations viewed themselves and viewed other groups from Sea Island cotton plantations and urban centers like Savannah and Beaufort when they were all resettled in Beaufort during the critical Civil War period. This talk chronicles this important microcosm of creolization using the experiences of Blacks enslaved on Combahee River rice plantations and freed in the 1863 raid to create a model of cultural change among New World African cultures and their complicated and nuanced relationships to pre-colonial Western Africa, their environments, and the plantation economies in which they were enslaved.

Edda L. Fields-Black is an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of History). Fields-Black is the author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (2008, 2014). With Francesca Bray, Peter Coclanis, and Dagmar Schaeffer, Fields-Black co-edited Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (2015, 2017), which won Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015. She is currently writing Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and the Construction of Gullah Geechee Identity, which chronicles an important microcosm of creolization using the experiences of Blacks enslaved on Combahee River rice plantations and freed in the 1863 raid to create a model of cultural change among New World African cultures and their complicated and nuanced relationships to pre-colonial Western Africa, their environments, and the plantation economies in which they were enslaved. For her research on the Gullah Geechee, Fields-Black was awarded a Smithsonian Senior Fellowship at the in the Spring semester of 2013, an Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship for the 2013-2014 academic year, and a Senior Ford Foundation Fellowship for the 2017-2018 academic year.

In addition, Fields-Black is currently collaborating with filmmaker Julie Dash and composer Dr. Trevor Weston to produce Casop: A Requiem for Rice, a lamentation for the repose of the souls of the dead who were enslaved, exploited, and brutalized on Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia’s rice plantations and who remain unburied, unmourned, and unmarked. Fields-Black is writing the libretto on which Casop is based. Opening in 2018, this musical production for symphony orchestra, choir, and West African drummers and dancers will memorialize the sufferings and sacrifices of Africans enslaved on Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia Rice plantations and celebrate the critical role their ingenuity, technology, and industry played in the economy of the US South.

Free and open to the public.

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

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 08 Dec 2017 11:40:32 -0500 2018-02-15T16:00:00-05:00 2018-02-15T18:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Edda L. Fields-Black
EIHS Workshop: Facing the Deep African Past: Reflections on Rupture, Modernity, and Conversion in the African Atlantic (February 16, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/47888 47888-11043646@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 16, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

This panel engages with themes from Edda L. Fields-Black’s Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (2008). Moving from early 18th century Kongo to the colonization of Liberia and ending in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, presenters will discuss questions of inheritance, innovation, borrowing, and the process of cultural transmission in the formation of new historical subjectivities in the African Atlantic. Professor Ware will provide a brief discussion of Deep Roots and the contributions of Professor Fields-Black’s work prior to the presentations. Professor Fields-Black will respond and offer comments after the presentations. Featuring:

Juan Rodriguez Barrera (Graduate Student, American Culture, University of Michigan)
Sargeant Donovan-Smith (Graduate Student, Anthropology and History, University of Michigan)
Richard Hoffman Reinhardt (Graduate Student, Anthropology and History, University of Michigan)
Edda L. Fields-Black (commentator; Associate Professor, History, Carnegie Mellon University)
Rudolph "Butch" Ware (chair; Associate Professor, History, University of Michigan)

Free and open to the public. Lunch provided.

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

Photo: "Break Point" (yellowcloud, CC-BY-2.0).

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 07 Feb 2018 13:21:01 -0500 2018-02-16T12:00:00-05:00 2018-02-16T14:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop / Seminar Workshop Graphic
Comparative Literature Colloquium (February 16, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50028 50028-11622342@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 16, 2018 3:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Comparative Literature

Marjorie Levinson and Karl Gaudyn will be presenting.

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 13 Feb 2018 13:27:58 -0500 2018-02-16T15:00:00-05:00 2018-02-16T16:30:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Comparative Literature Lecture / Discussion Tisch Hall
STS Speaker. Indigenous Climate Change Studies and Justice: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene (February 19, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/43477 43477-9771968@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, February 19, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Science, Technology & Society

Indigenous peoples are creating an STS-related field to support their own capacities to address anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. Indigenous studies often reflect the memories and realms of knowledge that arise from Indigenous peoples’ living heritages as societies with stories, lessons, and long histories of having to be well-organized to adapt to seasonal and inter-annual environmental changes. At the same time, our societies have been heavily disrupted by colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization. Through discussing the themes unique to Indigenous climate change studies, I will claim that Indigenous studies offer critical decolonizing approaches by which to address climate change and achieve climate justice. These approaches arise from how our ways of imagining the future guide our present actions. The presentation will cover and integrate a range of topics, from the Dakota Access Pipeline to the Indigenous science movement to Indigenous science fiction imagination.

Kyle Whyte (Potawatomi) holds the Timnick Chair in the Humanities at Michigan State University. He is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Community Sustainability, a faculty member of the Environmental Philosophy & Ethics graduate concentration, and a faculty affiliate of the American Indian Studies and Environmental Science & Policy programs. His primary research addresses moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples and the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and climate science organizations.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 02 Feb 2018 08:40:17 -0500 2018-02-19T16:00:00-05:00 2018-02-19T17:30:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Science, Technology & Society Lecture / Discussion Kyle Whyte 2017
War, Medicine, and Cultural Diplomacy (February 21, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48390 48390-11230554@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

Simone P. Kropf (Oswaldo Cruz Foundation/Fiocruz, Brazil)
Joel D. Howell (University of Michigan)

The United States and Brazil became close allies in World War II, not only in political, economic and military issues, but also in social and cultural ones, including science. Inter-American cultural diplomacy aimed to promote “hemispheric solidarity” against Nazism created channels through which scientific ideas and technologies could circulate. This talk is about one of those flows, between the University of Michigan Medical School and Brazilian physicians engaged in the study and treatment of heart disease. Frank Wilson was a pioneer in electrocardiography who trained many Latin Americans in his laboratory at the University of Michigan. In 1942, he made an extended wartime visit to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo sponsored by the US Department of State as part of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy. The visit brought Wilson together with a group of physicians engaged in constructing the specialty of cardiology in Brazil. This initiative strengthened an academic network that would benefit both sides. While affiliation with the “Wilson school” advanced the cause of Brazilian cardiologists who sought to establish themselves as specialists, cooperation with those “neighbors from the South” and the identity as a scientific ambassador to Latin America benefited Wilson in his pursuit of international recognition for his ECG innovations. Wilson’s relationship to Brazilian cardiology illustrates close relations between science, technology and politics in a context of wartime cultural diplomacy, as well as the dynamics of the transnational circulation of scientific knowledge and practices.

This research was supported by the UM Brazil Initiative at the Center of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS) (website: https://www.ii.umich.edu/lacs/brazil-initiative.html), the Brazilian Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz, Brazil).

Simone P. Kropf holds a PhD in History from the Universidade Federal Fluminense, in Brazil, and is a professor in the Graduate Program of the History of Sciences and Health in Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, in Rio de Janeiro. She is currently pursuing a postdoctoral research visit at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS). She has written about the history of biomedical sciences in Brazil in the 20th century. She is currently doing research on the cultural and educational exchanges between the University of Michigan and Latin American countries between 1938 and 1945, in the context of the Pan-Americanism movement and the Good Neighbor Policy.

Joel D. Howell, MD, PhD is a faculty member in the Department of History and Internal Medicine, and is the Victor C. Vaughan Professor of History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. His primary research interest is in the use of medical technology in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 24 Jan 2018 14:34:40 -0500 2018-02-21T16:00:00-05:00 2018-02-21T17:30:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Lecture / Discussion Tisch Hall
The Picturesque Soldier and Mourning Mother: Gender, Memory, and the First World War in Interwar Serbia (February 22, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49486 49486-11464937@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, February 22, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of American Culture

This lecture focuses on two types of sources, laments of Serbian women and photographs by Serbian military photographers, as entry points into understanding the private, cultural, and religious arenas of Serbian First World War and interwar remembrances. Drawing on research examining the political uses of lament and grief, the lecture considers the role Serbian women played in controlling and directing the “passion of grief and anger” within their communities as they remembered the dead. The photographic evidence reveals that traditional death rituals and laments were performed and that these rituals were significant socio-political spaces where women, families, and communities of soldiers advanced claims or recognition of their wartime experiences and memories.

Melissa Bokovoy is a professor at the University of New Mexico. She teaches courses on eastern and western Europe in the twentieth century, as well as the western civilization surveys. Her main area of research is the history of the south Slavs (Yugoslavia) in the twentieth century. She has worked primarily on the post World War II period, focusing on the social and political relationships between Yugoslav society and its Communist party-state.

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 30 Jan 2018 14:11:54 -0500 2018-02-22T16:00:00-05:00 2018-02-22T18:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Department of American Culture Lecture / Discussion soldier
Medieval Lunch. A Prisoner of His Skin: The Paradoxes of King Mobad's Power (March 7, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48782 48782-11306112@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, March 7, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS)

The Medieval Lunch Series is an informal program for sharing works-in-progress and fostering community among medievalists at the University of Michigan. Faculty and graduate students from across disciplines participate, sharing their research and discussing ongoing projects.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 18 Jan 2018 15:09:15 -0500 2018-03-07T12:00:00-05:00 2018-03-07T13:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) Lecture / Discussion “The Marriage of sudaba and kai kavus,” ca. 1525-30 CE, The Shahama of Shah Tahmasp fol.130r. Source: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/452129
EIHS Lecture: Biography and History: Building a Successful Life in the Wake of the French Revolution (March 8, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/40918 40918-8828530@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, March 8, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

This lecture seeks to provide a biographical lens through which to understand the French Revolution by tracing the life and career of mining engineer Augustin-Henry Bonnard (1781-1857). Professor Goodman will show how Bonnard drew upon complex family legacies to define and achieve a successful life in the wake of the Revolution. For Bonnard, the past was not a burden, but a valuable resource. In the politically turbulent world of revolutionary and post-revolutionary France he succeeded not by casting off the weight of the past or responding to the changing political winds, but by holding to a steady course that reflected his family’s long tradition of royal service and strong commitment to Enlightenment values.

Dena Goodman is Lila Miller Collegiate Professor of History and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan and co-director of The Encyclopedia of Diderot and D'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, a digital humanities project housed at the University of Michigan. Her research centers on the cultural history of early modern France, with particular interests in the Enlightenment, women and gender, material culture, writing, and sociability. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Voltaire Foundation. Her publications include The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (1994) and Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (2009). She has also edited or co-edited several volumes, including Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France (1995), Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of the Queen (2003) and Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past (2006). She is currently engaged in a family history during the era of the French Revolution which explores Enlightenment legacies in a variety of domains, including science and technology, intellectual sociability, and state service.

Free and open to the public.

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

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 05 Mar 2018 10:39:00 -0500 2018-03-08T16:00:00-05:00 2018-03-08T18:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Dena Goodman
EIHS Lecture: The Future of (Public) History (March 9, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/47891 47891-11043649@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 9, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

The future of all history—including academia—is public. The days of invisible faculty sequestered in ivory towers are ending (if not over). Scholars, departments, deans and colleges—they will increasingly be asked to demonstrate impact. They will expect their history departments to have public reach and they will expect that historical scholarship have some influence among non-expert audiences. Is the profession prepared for this future? This talk will consider where we are, where we're headed, and the role of history communication in the profession's future.

Jason Steinhauer is the inaugural director of the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest at Villanova University. A noted public historian, he is a recognized emerging leader of America's cultural and historical institutions. He previously worked at The John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, the Library of Congress Veterans History Project, as a museum curator and as an archivist. He coined the term "History Communicators" and established the field of history communication.

Free and open to the public. Lunch provided.

Presented in partnership with the Rackham Graduate School Program in Public Scholarship.

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

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 28 Feb 2018 13:20:12 -0500 2018-03-09T12:00:00-05:00 2018-03-09T14:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Jason Steinhauer
STS Distinguished Speaker. Making Postcolonial Bodies: Tales from An"Other" Enlightenment (March 12, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/43478 43478-9771969@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, March 12, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Science, Technology & Society

This talk explores how science and religion come together in in contemporary Hindu nationalism to create a very particular and powerful biopolitical imaginary. Religious nationalists have selectively, and strategically, used rhetoric from both science and Hinduism, modernity and orthodoxy, western and eastern thought to build a powerful but potentially dangerous vision of a Hindu nation. With aspirations for a global and modern Hinduism, scientific and religious practices in contemporary India are inextricably interconnected and result in fluid processes and practices of both institutions. The case of India reminds us about both the transnational stakes of science as well as the local instantiations that challenge enlightenment narratives of reason and unreason. Ultimately to understand contemporary technoscience in India, we need new epistemological and methodological tools, and story-making practices to make visible the many phantasmogoric natural and cultural worlds within.

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 06 Nov 2017 08:59:42 -0500 2018-03-12T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-12T17:30:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Science, Technology & Society Lecture / Discussion Prof Banu Subramaniam
The Republic of the Unlettered: Ordinary Litigants, Civil Law and Writing during the Spanish Imperial Enlightenment (March 14, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49787 49787-11532480@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, March 14, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

An overview of Professor Premo's 2017 book, The Enlightenment on Trial, this lecture add deeper consideration of the constraints of traditional approaches to intellectual history and special attention to women’s subjectivity in legal sources from eighteenth-century Peru and Mexico.

Bianca Premo is an associate professor of Latin American history at Florida International University. Her research interests encompass a wide range of topics in Spanish American history, including the law, childhood and youth, intellectual history, gender, slavery and ethnohistory. In recent years, she has explored the history of Mexico City and Oaxaca, as well as Spanish history, especially the rural region around the city of Toledo. She is the author of Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (UNC, 2005) and, most recently, The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (Oxford, 2017), as well as over a dozen articles and book chapters on colonial Spanish America appearing in journals including The Hispanic American Historical Review, Slavery and Abolition, and The William and Mary Quarterly. Her work has been supported the NEH, the ACLS, and the National Science Foundation.

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 21 Feb 2018 13:01:00 -0500 2018-03-14T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-14T18:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Lecture / Discussion Bianca Premo
EIHS Workshop: Expectant Bodies: Gender, Textuality, Sovereignty (March 23, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/47889 47889-11043647@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 23, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

This panel takes up “expectation” as both a structure of being in and knowing the world, and as a methodological condition of producing historical knowledge. Stretching from twelfth-century England to late eighteenth-century St. Petersburg, these papers ask: how did gender and sexuality shape what medieval and early modern people expected of each other? How do scholarly expectations shape the stories we tell? Featuring:

Hayley Bowman (PhD Student, History, University of Michigan)
Joseph Gamble (PhD Student; Women's Studies, English; University of Michigan)
Nicholas Holterman (Graduate Student, Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan)
William Holden (PhD Student, History, University of Michigan)
Ruth Mazo Karras (commentator; Distinguished Teaching Professor of History, University of Minnesota)
Katherine French (chair; J. Frederick Hoffman Professor of History, University of Michigan)

Free and open to the public. Lunch provided.

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

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 16 Mar 2018 08:54:13 -0400 2018-03-23T12:00:00-04:00 2018-03-23T14:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop / Seminar Workshop Graphic
STS Speaker. Bureaucratic epistemes and regulatory disputes: Genetically Modified (GM) crops between science and legal-administration (March 26, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/43479 43479-9771970@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, March 26, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Science, Technology & Society

A fierce controversy surrounding the question of allowing commercial release of GM food crops, has been raging in India for nearly a decade. While the controversy concerns far-reaching issues of food security, food sovereignty, consumers' choice, farmers' livelihoods and ecological impacts, these are articulated in government policymaking via bureaucratic routines and documents. In this talk, I examine the regulatory regime overseeing GM crops in India, instituted in the late 1980s, to argue that two epistemes - scientific and legal-administrative - are fused in its design. By unraveling the course of two regulatory disputes, I suggest that an inherent ambiguity is lodged between scientific and legal-administrative modes of documentation, as facts generated in one register can be challenged by those registered in the other. I demonstrate that this ambiguity both fosters and constrains democratic participation and scrutiny over government policymaking, with deeply ambivalent implications.

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 19 Mar 2018 10:27:10 -0400 2018-03-26T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-26T17:30:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Science, Technology & Society Lecture / Discussion Prof. Aniket Aga
Medieval Lunch. "And for his sake to help his neighbor": Nice Wanton and Neighborhood Surveillance (March 27, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48967 48967-11339494@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, March 27, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS)

The Medieval Lunch Series is an informal program for sharing works-in-progress and fostering community among medievalists at the University of Michigan. Faculty and graduate students from across disciplines participate, sharing their research and discussing ongoing projects.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 19 Jan 2018 10:53:38 -0500 2018-03-27T12:00:00-04:00 2018-03-27T13:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) Lecture / Discussion Vagrant being punished in the streets in Tudor England, 1536. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrancy_(people)#/media/File:Vagrant_being_punished_in_the_streets_(Tudor_England).jpg
History Club presents: From Stage To Snapchat: Examining the History of Blackface in American Society (April 3, 2018 6:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51492 51492-12121111@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, April 3, 2018 6:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

If you have heard about the incidents with incoming students and blackface on Snapchat and are interested in learning more about the relevance of blackface today, as well as its historical context as a practice, the History Club is hosting a talk on April 3rd at 7pm in 1014 Tisch Hall. Professor Berrey will be taking a look at how Americans interacted with blackface throughout recent history, going back to playbills in minstrel shows popular in the 19th century to more modern representations in mass media. The talk will definitely be an informative and engaging one for those wishing to understand how this depiction has continued to harm and denigrate black Americans, and why this practice is still being invoked today.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 29 Mar 2018 10:19:59 -0400 2018-04-03T18:00:00-04:00 2018-04-03T20:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Lecture / Discussion Tisch Hall
EIHS Lecture: Columbus the Muslim (April 5, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/40920 40920-8828532@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, April 5, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Christopher Columbus lived the vast majority of his life in a Mediterranean world in which the Ottoman and Mamluk Empires dominated the eastern part of the sea and were in constant economic, political, and confrontational interaction with the Christian states of Europe. This talk considers the importance of Islam in shaping Columbus's life and voyages. In doing so, it thinks critically about the role of Islam in the Spanish decision to send him across the ocean and in the early history of the Spanish Caribbean. It furthermore uses this Muslim history of Columbus to suggest ways of analyzing early modern periodization and the place of Islam in the making of the modern world.

Alan Mikhail is professor of history at Yale University. He is a historian of the early modern Muslim world, the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt. His publications include Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt and Environmental History (University of Chicago Press, 2017); The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2014); Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge University Press, 2011); and the edited volume Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Free and open to the public.

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

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 27 Mar 2018 07:29:40 -0400 2018-04-05T16:00:00-04:00 2018-04-05T18:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Alan Mikhail
EIHS Workshop: Contextualizing Columbus: Mobility, Place-Making, Periodization, and Islam (April 6, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/47890 47890-11043648@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 6, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Islam played an important role as a catalyst for Columbus’ voyage across the Atlantic. The cosmopolitan Islamicate world that informed his journey united vast networks of far-flung trade routes with major urban centers. This panel will examine the important connecting threads of mobility, place-making, and periodization that inform analysis of his journey in three contexts. Travelling from premodern maritime trade routes to Mongol building projects, and utilizing Islamic endowment deeds and polemics against the Qur’an, this panel will explore the creative tensions of pre- and early modern place-making.

Presentations include:

The Ocean Blue: Spice Routes, Islam, and Globalization Before Columbus (Amanda Respess, Graduate Student, Anthropology and History, University of Michigan)
The event of Columbus’s voyage across the Atlantic represented a conjunction of short-term historical developments and long-term environmental and cultural patterns. This presentation will contextualize Columbus's attempt to reach the East by foregrounding the longue durée of premodern Indian Ocean maritime navigation, turning special attention to the role of Islam in early globalization in the eastern Indian Ocean and South China Sea.

Ghazaniyya: A City Built for a Sacred King (Golriz Farshi, Graduate Student, Near Eastern Studies, University of Michigan)
The conversion of the Ilkhanid Dynasty (1256-1353 C.E.) to Islam marked a transition in place-making practices and urban development by hitherto itinerant Mongols. The long-standing Islamicate tradition of mausoleum building supplanted the tradition of unmarked graves, and helped structure a new style of governance.This presentation will reconstruct the endowed model city of Ghazaniyya which centered on the mausoleum of the Ilkhan Ghazan Khan.

The Mobilization of Manuscripts and Papal Place-Making During the Transition from Medieval to Early Modern Europe (Kate Waggoner Karchner, Graduate Student, History, University of Michigan)
This presentation will broadly trace the transmission of a late thirteenth-century religious disputation of the Qur'an - Riccoldo da Montecroce's Against the Law of the Saracens - throughout early modern Europe, highlighting its link to moments of heightened awareness of the Ottoman Empire's threat to the traditional bounds of Christendom. The papacy used the polemic against an external threat as a tool to reassert its own position and reaffirm the need for traditional power dynamics in the face of challenges to its sovereignty.

Alan Mikhail (Professor, History, Yale University) will comment on the papers. Kathryn Babayan (Associate Professor; History, Near Eastern Studies, University of Michigan) will chair the panel.

Free and open to the public. Lunch provided.

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

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 27 Mar 2018 09:36:02 -0400 2018-04-06T12:00:00-04:00 2018-04-06T14:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop / Seminar Workshop Graphic
Undergraduate Honors Thesis Presentations (April 6, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51715 51715-12205473@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 6, 2018 2:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Comparative Literature

Learn from and support our Comp Lit majors as they present their honors theses. There will be three short presentations with ample room for discussion.

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Presentation Thu, 05 Apr 2018 15:34:13 -0400 2018-04-06T14:00:00-04:00 2018-04-06T17:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Comparative Literature Presentation Tisch Hall
MEMS Lecture Series. Portraits of Luther, from Lucas Cranach to Today (April 6, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49821 49821-11543720@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 6, 2018 3:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS)

It is 500 years since Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses in Wittenberg and the Reformation began. But without the artist Lucas Cranach, who lived around the corner, would Luther’s Reformation have been so successful? Images were central to the Reformation and the Cranach workshop produced an extraordinary series of portraits of Luther through each stage of his life. Finally, the Reformation anniversary has inspired some powerful new images of the reformer: What does Luther look like now?

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 03 Apr 2018 16:12:45 -0400 2018-04-06T15:00:00-04:00 2018-04-06T17:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) Lecture / Discussion Poster for Roper
STS Speaker. Credibility Struggles in Times of Tectonic Upheaval: Rethinking Civic Epistemologies around Indian Nuclear Power Politics (April 9, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/43480 43480-9771971@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, April 9, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Science, Technology & Society

Sheila Jasanoff conceptualized civic epistemologies as stable, socio-institutional forms of vetting, producing, and using policy-relevant knowledge that persist in particular political cultures. STS studies of credibility struggles are premised upon shared epistemological and moral foundations, even as they carefully remove markers of the all-too-human arbitration process. But how should one view credibility struggles in times of geological upheaval, where epistemological and political substrates are being torn apart and reconfigured? How should we conceptualize democratic legitimacy during periods of technological intrusions? Using the case of anti-nuclear activism in India, I demonstrate how activists, villagers, and different state officials are engaged in tectonic credibility struggles. Such contestations are overtly political and epistemic, and attempt to instantiate particular nuclear-democratic imaginaries by forming and expanding credibility economies across different audiences. The substantial challenges activists face in forming networked credibility economies necessitate re-theorizing civic epistemologies in India and beyond.

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 06 Nov 2017 08:58:43 -0500 2018-04-09T16:00:00-04:00 2018-04-09T17:30:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Science, Technology & Society Lecture / Discussion Prof. Monamie Bhadra
Materialities: Ancient and Modern (April 13, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46885 46885-10667316@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 13, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Judaic Studies

How do the materials of antiquity, from everyday objects and paintings to monumental buildings, make their way into contemporary lives and scholarship? What bearing have these traces of ancient material culture had on contemporary culture? Toggling between antiquity and the present, noted art historians Annabel Wharton and Jaś Elsner will discuss the modern afterlives of ancient materials—their transmissions, citations, and repurposings. In concert with this year’s Frankel Institute theme of Jews and the Material in Antiquity, the conversation will also address the vexed role of Jews and Judaism in the formation of modern conceptions of materiality and historiography on visuality and religion.

Event Accessibility: There is an elevator and accessible and gender neutral restroom on the first floor of the building. If you have a disability that requires an accommodation, contact the Judaic Studies office at judaicstuies@umich.edu or 734-763-9047.

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 02 Apr 2018 12:01:57 -0400 2018-04-13T12:00:00-04:00 2018-04-13T14:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Judaic Studies Lecture / Discussion Figures_The_erection_of_the_Tabernacle_and_the_Sacred_vessels
Tumblr as Pedagogy, Theory, and Archive (April 13, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51548 51548-12158804@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 13, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of English Language and Literature

Focusing on a range of online communities and praxes—from music fandoms to women of color feminisms—this panel explores explores theory, form, and activism on the microblogging site Tumblr. How does Tumblr provide models of seriality, or create utopian coalitions? How can Tumblr engage with other forms of multi- and social media? Join us for these questions and more.

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 02 Apr 2018 13:28:57 -0400 2018-04-13T16:00:00-04:00 2018-04-13T18:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Department of English Language and Literature Lecture / Discussion Poster for Tumblr Panel
Medieval Lunch. Religious Orthodoxy and Coexistence, Medieval and Early Modern (April 17, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48925 48925-11331170@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, April 17, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS)

Paroma Chatterjee, U-M History of Art "Ancient Statues in Medieval
Constantinople: History, Longevity, and Orthodoxy"

Haley Bowen, U-M History "Seeking Christ's Peace: The Rhetoric of Religious
Reconciliation in Sixteenth-Century France

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 18 Jan 2018 15:06:08 -0500 2018-04-17T12:00:00-04:00 2018-04-17T13:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) Lecture / Discussion Map of Constantinople, 1422 CE, Cristoforo Buondelmonti. Source: http://libguides.ku.edu.tr/c.php?g=623293&p=4591414
EIHS Lecture: The Impostor Sea: The Making of the Medieval Mediterranean (September 13, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52312 52312-12631412@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, September 13, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Abstract: The past century of scholarship has offered two competing views of the medieval Mediterranean: a zone of intense conflict or one of intense connectivity. Grounded in Latin, Romance, and Arabic sources, this lecture traces the activities of criminal merchants—smugglers—who populated the thirteenth- and fourteenth- century Mediterranean, in order to rethink the relationship between religion and economy. I approach these figures not as “enemies of all” but rather as central to the making of the late medieval Mediterranean. I argue that efforts to regulate illicit activity reflected an important juridical turn that profoundly shaped the emergence of new religious, territorial, and racial boundaries.

Hussein Fancy’s research and writing focus on the social, cultural, and intellectual history of religious interaction in the medieval Mediterranean. In particular, he is interested in projects that combine the use of Latin, Arabic, and Romance archival sources. His first book, The Mercenary Mediterranean, which recently received the Verbruggen Prize for military history, examined the service of Muslim soldiers from North Africa to the Christian kings of the Crown of Aragon in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Far from marking the triumph of toleration, he argued, the alliance of Christian kings and Muslim soldiers depended on and reproduced ideas of religious difference. He is currently working on two projects. The first, entitled The Impostor Sea: The Making of the Medieval Mediterranean, follows the activities of criminal merchants—pirates and smugglers—in order to rethink the relationship between religion and trade. Rather than “enemies of all,” this book argues that these figures were central to the making of new legal, religious, and racial boundaries in the late medieval Mediterranean. The second, entitled The Eastern Question, examines western views of Islam from the seventh century to the present. Professor Fancy has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. Most notably, he was a Junior Fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows, a Carnegie Scholar, an ACLS Fellow, and a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

Free and open to the public.

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

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 14 Aug 2018 16:21:28 -0400 2018-09-13T16:00:00-04:00 2018-09-13T18:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Hussein Fancy
EIHS Symposium: Museum Stories: The Ethics of Collecting (September 14, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54001 54001-13513044@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 14, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

What constitutes rightful ownership of cultural objects? The unprecedented looting of modern wars as well as various protest movements have spawned international regulations, declarations, and efforts that offer guidance in this regard. The extant framework, however, falls short of exhausting the ethical problems raised by artifacts, their histories, and their displays. For museum and university collections these questions have gained the greatest urgency. Our panel offers reflections on this vast terrain; three case studies will follow an opening contribution by one of the foremost experts on restitution, repatriation, and cultural heritage law.

Note: This event counts toward Responsible Conduct in Research and Scholarship (RCRS) training requirements for graduate students in History and possibly other disciplines.

Panelists:
Patty Gerstenblith, Distinguished Research Professor of Law, DePaul University
Raymond Silverman, Professor, History of Art, Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan
Terry G. Wilfong, Director / Curator of Graeco-Roman Egyptian Collections, Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan
Yao-Fen You, Associate Curator, European Sculpture and Decorative ArtsDetroit Institute of Arts
Helmut Puff (chair), Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Collegiate Professor of History and Germanic Languages, University of Michigan

Free and open to the public. Lunch provided.

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

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Conference / Symposium Mon, 10 Sep 2018 09:56:00 -0400 2018-09-14T12:00:00-04:00 2018-09-14T14:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Conference / Symposium Museum Stories poster
Medieval Lunch. "Risk (Genoa, 1154)" & "No shoes allowed: Jewish Traditions between Spain and the Maghreb" (September 18, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55373 55373-13722868@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, September 18, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS)

Risk (Genoa, 1154)
The word "risk" entered the languages of western Europe in the mid-12th century. The Latin resicum first appeared in notarial archives in Genoa, and was used to describe a payment awarded to those who invested in dangerous trans-Mediterranean shipping. It comes from the Arabic word al-rizq, which in the Qur'an referred to the means of subsistence provided by God. In this presentation, we'll look at the very earliest attested uses of the Latin resicum and think together about how the word entered Latin, what it meant in these earliest contracts, and why the word and its cognates was embraced with such enthusiasm in the European languages.

No shoes allowed: Jewish Tradition between Spain and the Maghreb
Sephardi Jews living in the early modern Maghreb struggled to preserve their old traditions while adjusting to their new Islamic surrounding. This short talk will discuss a specific rabbinical answer from the mid-15th century, which tried to offer a general principle for Jewish cultural adaptability. More broadly, it will look at responsa literature as a fundamental source for the study of Mediterranean scholarly networks.

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 14 Sep 2018 10:01:55 -0400 2018-09-18T12:00:00-04:00 2018-09-18T13:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) Workshop / Seminar Risk image
Early Atlantic Workshop. Crowded Places: Slavery, Science, and the Roots of Fresh Air in the Atlantic World (September 21, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55250 55250-13707122@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 21, 2018 2:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

In the late-eighteenth century, European chemists Antoine Lavoisier, Joseph Priestley, and Carl Wilhelm Scheele all individually claimed that they had first discovered the element oxygen. While the debate escalated among British, German, and French scientists, British physicians proved the existence of oxygen by turning to the international slave trade. They showed how lack of oxygen among enslaved Africans crammed in the bottom of ships, which traveled from Africa to the Caribbean, led to high mortality rates. The international slave trade, in turn, made a scientific theory legible. Oxygen later emerged as a key element in the periodic table but how the international slave trade gave it scientific validity has been forgotten.

This paper grows out of Prof. Downs' book project, "The Laboring Dead: From Subjugation to Science in Global History."

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 13 Sep 2018 08:31:56 -0400 2018-09-21T14:00:00-04:00 2018-09-21T16:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Lecture / Discussion Tisch Hall
Revisiting Violence (September 24, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55592 55592-13759178@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, September 24, 2018 3:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

This initiative seeks to bring together a community of thinkers, readers, and practitioners of theoretical, literary, and visual works to advance conversations between Critical and Postcolonial/de-colonial theories (broadly defined) at Michigan.

This meeting will discuss the work of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon in the context of Walter Benjamin.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 18 Sep 2018 16:51:36 -0400 2018-09-24T15:00:00-04:00 2018-09-24T17:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Workshop / Seminar Tisch Hall
EIHS Lecture: Untopics in History: Air Travel Anthropology (September 27, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52313 52313-12631413@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, September 27, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Abstract: Anthropologists and historians fly to work. We fly to the archive. We fly to the field. (At least those of us with documents, time, and money do.) Yet airline travel seldom appears as a topic in the ethnographic pieces we write, though other modes of transport frequently do. In this talk, I explore how this form of flight became an untopic in anthropology. I delve into the works of black surrealists and structural anthropologists from the 1940s and 1950s. Inspired by critical race studies, I think historically about the origins of a claim often heard when discussing airborne ethnographic fieldwork: “I’ve never thought about that.” The aim of the talk is to understand how untopics and unthoughts are made, grapple with their effects, find ways to dismantle them, and envision what does not come next.

Chandra D. Bhimull, an associate professor of anthropology and African American studies at Colby College, is a graduate of the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan. As an anthrohistorian, she combines archival and ethnographic methods and carries out her fieldwork in the Caribbean, Europe, and the transatlantic skies. Her research has been supported by organizations such as the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution, Ford Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Her first book, Empire in the Air: Airline Travel and the African Diaspora (New York University Press, 2017), examines the racial politics of flying. Among her other works are a co-edited volume on transdisciplinarity and creative non-fiction essays about air culture and deportation flights. She is currently writing a book about race, sense, and scale.

Free and open to the public.

Part of the semester-long series celebrating 30 years of the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History.

This event is part of the Thursday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg. Additional support from the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 23 Aug 2018 10:22:42 -0400 2018-09-27T16:00:00-04:00 2018-09-27T18:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Chandra Bhimull
EIHS Workshop: Technologies of Movement and Belonging (September 28, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54003 54003-13513045@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 28, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

As we travel through a world that moves ever more rapidly around us, how and where do we build and maintain senses of belonging? Showcasing work of graduate students researching contemporary media environments in south India, the Nigerianization of the hajj, and how road construction shaped governance in Palestine, this workshop engages critical questions about how power manifests in the ways people move, how movement shapes our social worlds, and how community bonds and notions of selfhood develop as we navigate changing technological environments.

Panelists:
Padma Chirumamilla, PhD Student, School of Information, University of Michigan
Sara Katz, PhD Candidate, History, University of Michigan
Omer Sharir, PhD Candidate, History, University of Michigan
Chandra D. Bhimull (respondent), Associate Professor, Anthropology, African American Studies, Colby College
Deirdre de la Cruz (chair), Associate Professor, History, Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan

Free and open to the public. Lunch provided.

Part of the semester-long series celebrating 30 years of the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History.

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

photo: "ghost station," Matthias Rhomberg (CC BY 2.0)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 19 Sep 2018 12:35:58 -0400 2018-09-28T12:00:00-04:00 2018-09-28T14:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop / Seminar "ghost station," Matthias Rhomberg (CC BY 2.0)
Comp Lit Alumni Panel: Looking Backward, Looking Forward (September 28, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54123 54123-13530645@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 28, 2018 3:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Comparative Literature

Join alumni Sara Grewal, Ramon Stern, and Bram Acosta as they address diversity, equity, and inclusion within the context of Comparative Literature. By drawing on their own experiences at the University of Michigan and their home institutions, alumni will discuss the obstacles that women and underrepresented students experience to timely completion and develop strategies to support them. To this end, they will address the following questions: What obstacles to your health, wellbeing, and education did you encounter? How did you find allies? How can you be allies to others? How do you foster a collegial environment? What forms of collaboration did you value when you were in grad school? How did your perspectives shift throughout and after your graduate school experience?

This panel is aimed at Comparative Literature graduate students. Refreshments provided.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 28 Sep 2018 09:35:31 -0400 2018-09-28T15:00:00-04:00 2018-09-28T17:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Comparative Literature Lecture / Discussion Tisch Hall
The Nicaragua Solidarity Caravan (October 4, 2018 1:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56156 56156-13839520@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, October 4, 2018 1:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Nicaragua is currently facing the worst political crisis it has seen in decades. In April 2018, state repression of citizens protesting social security reforms unleashed a decade of accumulated grievances against the Ortega-Murillo government. Citizens from across all sectors of Nicaraguan society took to the streets to protest state violence and authoritarianism. In response, the state has killed as many as five hundred people. Thousands of citizens have been injured, hundreds have been illegally detained, and tens of thousands have fled the country for Costa Rica or the United States. A new generation of Nicaraguan activists are leading this popular movement for justice.

A new generation of Nicaraguan activists are leading this popular movement for justice. Join us for a conversation with three of these activists, representing the Platform for Social Movements and Civil Society Organizations, on the historical origins of the crisis, movement actors and demands, and the current state of human rights in Nicaragua.

The University of Michigan and Michigan State University have collaborated to bring the caravan to Southeast Michigan. The caravan will participate in three public roundtable discussions.

Wednesday, October 3, 2018 // 7:30-9:00 pm
The Episcopal Church of the Incarnation, 3257 Lohr Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48108

Thursday, October 4, 2018 // 1:00-3:00 pm
University of Michigan, 1014 Tisch Hall, 435 S. State St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Friday, October 5, 2018 // 3:00-5:00 pm
Michigan State University, James Madison College Library, Room 332 Case Hall, 842 Chestnut Road, East Lansing, MI 48825

Cosponsors:

University of Michigan: Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Residential College, International Institute, Peace and Conflict Initiative, Rackham Migration and Displacement Interdisciplinary Workshop, Department of History

Michigan State University: James Madison College, Lyman Briggs College, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Center for Gender in Global Context

Latin American Task Force - Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 28 Sep 2018 10:18:45 -0400 2018-10-04T13:00:00-04:00 2018-10-04T15:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies Lecture / Discussion crisis_image
Critical and Decolonial Theories: A Missed Dialog? (October 4, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56201 56201-13867050@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, October 4, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

This initiative seeks to bring together a community of thinkers, readers, and practitioners of theoretical, literary, and visual works to advance conversations between critical and postcolonial and de-colonial theories. The initiative is a cooperation between the University of Michigan, and the American University in Cairo. We will read and discuss the Introduction and Chapter 5 from Enzo Traverso’s 2016 book Left-Wing Melancholia.

In both sessions we will be joined by visiting scholars Surti Singh (American University in Cairo) and Sami Khatib (Leuphana University of Lüneburg).

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 01 Oct 2018 07:08:02 -0400 2018-10-04T16:00:00-04:00 2018-10-04T18:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Workshop / Seminar Tisch Hall
Critical and Decolonial Theories: A Missed Dialog? (October 5, 2018 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/56202 56202-13867051@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 5, 2018 10:00am
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

This initiative seeks to bring together a community of thinkers, readers, and practitioners of theoretical, literary, and visual works to advance conversations between critical and postcolonial and de-colonial theories. The initiative is a cooperation between the University of Michigan, and the American University in Cairo. We will discuss some short pieces by Benjamin, Fanon, Adorno, James and DuBois, used by Traverso in his book. These are recommended readings, and anyone who is interested in a conversation on these thinkers is welcome to attend.

In both sessions we will be joined by visiting scholars Surti Singh (American University in Cairo) and Sami Khatib (Leuphana University of Lüneburg).

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 01 Oct 2018 07:06:57 -0400 2018-10-05T10:00:00-04:00 2018-10-05T14:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Workshop / Seminar Tisch Hall
STS Speaker. Alternative Facts and States of Fear: Reality in the Age of Climate Fictions (October 8, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54115 54115-13528456@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, October 8, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Science, Technology & Society

This talk is concerned with the nature of reality in an age of “alternative facts.” It is a case study situated in the realm of mass market fiction that seeks to examine how postmodern techniques so often associated with STS have been deployed to undermine claims to scientific authority. Specifically, I look to the work of Harvard MD-turned-author, Michael Crichton, and his 2004 novel, State of Fear. What can Crichton’s particular form of cultural production teach us not only about specific scientific controversies, but an era now referred to as post-truth and an American president whose dominant political motives are a tangle of profit-making and fear-mongering? My approach does not attempt to purify fact from fiction or provide clarity amidst what Guy Debord called the “society of the spectacle,” in which representation is preferable to reality, truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Rather, I will discuss practices and techniques that have contributed to a reinvention of reality and argue that a rigorously feminist STS provides invaluable resources for navigating the present.

Biosketch: Joanna Radin is associate professor of History of Medicine at Yale where she is also affiliated with the Departments of History and of Anthropology as well as the programs in American Studies; Ethnicity, Race & Migration; and Religion & Modernity. Her research examines speculative projects of the post-war life and human sciences. She has particular interests in feminist, queer, and indigenous STS and science fiction. She is the author of Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (Chicago 2017), a history of the low-temperature biobank and co-editor, with Emma Kowal, of Cyropolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World (MIT 2017), which considers the technics and ethics of freezing across the life and environmental sciences.

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 25 Sep 2018 16:08:49 -0400 2018-10-08T16:00:00-04:00 2018-10-08T17:30:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Science, Technology & Society Lecture / Discussion Prof. Radin
Don't Blame the Working-Class: Understanding Working-Class Politics and Culture in the Trump Era (October 9, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55915 55915-13805085@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, October 9, 2018 3:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Residential College

Sherry Lee Linkon is a professor of English and American Studies at Georgetown University, where she directs both the Writing Program and the American Studies Program. Trained in American Studies, her research and teaching cover a wide range of fields, including American literature and culture, interdisciplinary teaching and learning, urban studies, and working-class studies. Her latest book, The
Half-Life of Deindustrialization: Working-Class Writing about Economic Restructuring (Michigan, 2018), examines contemporary writing that reflects the continuing effects of deindustrialization on ideas about work, place, and working-class culture.

John Russo is a Visiting Researcher at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University. Before moving to Washington, he was a Professor of Management and Coordinator of the Labor Studies Program in the Williamson College of Business Administration at Youngstown State University. Russo has written widely of labor and social issues and is recognized as a national expert on labor unions, work, and working-class politics. For his many activities, Dr. Russo is one of the few professors at YSU to have ever received Distinguished Professorship Awards in each of four areas: research and scholarship, teaching, university service, and public service.

Together, Linkon and Russo have produced two books: Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown (University Press of Kansas, 2002) and the edited collection New Working-Class Studies (Cornell UP, 2004). They also co-directed the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University for 17 years.

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 24 Sep 2018 15:20:02 -0400 2018-10-09T15:00:00-04:00 2018-10-09T17:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Residential College Lecture / Discussion Don't blame the working-class
EIHS Lecture: Medieval Chests as Ideological Objects (October 11, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52314 52314-12631414@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, October 11, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Abstract: Chests were the most common piece of medieval furniture. As aristocratic households moved from castle to castle, chests transported the valuables that accompanied them. After the Black Death, they were instrumental in helping Londoners cope with the consequences of the so-called consumer revolution: what to do with the profusion of dishware, clothing, and knick-knacks when they were not in use, and how to retrieve them when needed. Embedded in the routines of storage were larger ideological concerns of order, gender, and behavior; highly contested issues in the post-plague world. The chest helps us understand how domestic dynamics changed in the two-centuries following the plague.

Katherine French received her PhD in 1993 from the University of Minnesota, where she worked with Barbara Hanawalt. She taught at SUNY New Paltz, one of the regional universities in the SUNY system, for eighteen years before being appointed the J. Frederick Hoffman Professor of medieval English history at the University of Michigan in 2011. She has held fellowships at the Harvard Divinity School, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for the Humanities at Princeton, and U-M's Institute for the Humanities. Her scholarship focuses on women, religion, and material culture in late medieval England. Her first two monographs, The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval English Diocese (Philadelphia, 2001) and The Good Women of the Parish: Religion and Gender after the Black Death (Pennsylvania, 2008), analyzed the religious practices of English peasants and townspeople in the two hundred years between the Black Death (1348) and the Reformation. Most Reformation scholarship argued that local life was disintegrating. She was interested in the ways in which community identity and gender shape religious practice. She has also co-authored a text book Women and Gender in the Western Past (Houghton Mifflin, 2001) and is the author of more than twenty articles and book chapters. Her current book project “Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London” continues to try to understand the consequences of losing between a third to a half of the population to the Black Death. It asks how did increasing consumption after the Black Death by London’s merchants and artisans shaped their household dynamics.

Free and open to the public.

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

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 08 Oct 2018 08:31:28 -0400 2018-10-11T16:00:00-04:00 2018-10-11T18:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Katherine French
EIHS Symposium: The Past and Futures of Anthropology and History (October 12, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54009 54009-13513091@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 12, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

As part of a semester-long celebration of the thirtieth year of the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History, this panel brings together alumni and current students to reflect on the purchase and promise of our program at a time when established regimes of authority, knowledge, and expression are being called into question by groups spanning the political spectrum. A discussion that focuses on Anthro-History as an institutional, as much as intellectual, project seems especially opportune, and speakers will put their research and experience with the Anthro-History program in conversation with larger debates about disciplinarity, the university, privilege and power in academia, and the place of specialized knowledge in the public sphere.

Panelists:

Jamie Andreson, PhD Candidate in Anthropology and History, University of Michigan
Luciana Aenășoaie, Assistant Director, Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, University of Michigan (PhD, Anthropology and History, University of Michigan)
Natalie Rothman, Associate Professor, History, University of Toronto Scarborough (PhD, Anthropology and History, University of Michigan)
Reuben Riggs-Bookman (chair), PhD Student in Anthropology and History, University of Michigan

Free and open to the public. Lunch provided.

Part of the semester-long series celebrating 30 years of the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History.

This event is part of the Friday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg. Additional support from the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History.

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Conference / Symposium Thu, 04 Oct 2018 12:15:20 -0400 2018-10-12T12:00:00-04:00 2018-10-12T14:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Conference / Symposium Glendalough
MEMS Workshop. Domesticating Dragomans: Affect, Homosociality and Textual Circulations (October 12, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56315 56315-13878514@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 12, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS)

The chapter under consideration is from a book in progress about dragomans (diplomatic interpreters) in seventeenth-century Istanbul and explores the relationship between (homosocial) space and affect in the making of a dragoman corps. Through two case studies it examines how Venetian officials sought (and often failed) to cultivate dragomans’ heteronormative affective ties and loyal Venetian political subjectivity through the practice of extended residential apprenticeship in the Venetian embassy compound (bailate) and attended technologies of surveillance and controlled textual circulation. The two cases explored here, of dragomans’ attempted unionization in 1660 and of an aborted love affair between a dragoman apprentice and the bailate barber in 1588, suggest the competing ways in which dragomans and their Venetian employers attempted to control publicity about potentially scandalous affairs, how they mobilized patronage networks that linked the bailate with Venetian metropolitan institutions and powerful patrons, and how the archival traces from which these cases of "misplaced" affect are reconstructed themselves need to be situated in the context of evolving diplomatic protocol and Ottoman--as much as Venetian--social structures and sexual regimes.

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Workshop / Seminar Sat, 06 Oct 2018 14:08:36 -0400 2018-10-12T16:00:00-04:00 2018-10-12T17:30:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) Workshop / Seminar Dragoman ms illustration
STS Speaker. Unbalancing the Senses and Sciences of Moving Fascia: Practicing Research (October 22, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54692 54692-13636285@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, October 22, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Science, Technology & Society

Inside of the norming power of "balance" as a concept, lies the layering of balance as a moving-idea of ideal-movement. How "we" learn and incorporate the concept-practice of balancing gives shape to our lifeworld in political, historical, gymnastic and practical ways. Even the figuring of our "sense" of balance within and without "the five senses" is consequential for the shaping of ability and disability. Take this simple example: one hand touches another and each feels the skin, and under the skin, of each hand. One hand touches another and both change in skin and under the skin. The many senses—of touching, feeling, tactility, thermal, mechanical, and kinesthetic impressions, proprioceptive movement, weight and balance of self and others, affective pleasures, pain, distention, tickling, itching, tension and tone, anticipation and inspection—are in flux, social and cultural, yet trainable, extendable, transformable. Each nameable variable of the experience seems to matter and feedback into the experiment: pressure, weight, angle, movement, direction, depth of feel, intent, relaxation, length of time, sensitivity, attention. These “senses” complicate the world -- defined by Stengers with Whitehead as that which our senses testify to and raise questions about experimental ethical relations. At a more practical level among those who start thinking conceptually with training, the effect of ideas about body and movement on the practice of moving has been critically examined as "ideokinesis" by Mabel Todd in her 1930s Posture Lab – in which students became taller in a semester of imaginative exercises, since taken up into the training of dancers. Bourdieu describes this loop of habitus as: history turned into nature. Csordas describes perception itself "in the midst of arbitrariness and indeterminacy". Anatomy itself is also put into variation as different groups insist, discover and practice alternate claims to body “parts” such as “fascia”. Often called connective tissue (the goop or structure between muscles, organs, skin, and cells), but also found to be active, intelligent, communicative, and a sensory organ (the “interstitium”); sometimes three, sometimes many and sometimes one, liquid, solid and mucus, fascia stretches between communities of biologists, massage therapists, anatomists and pathologists, yoga and pilates teachers, doctors and dancers. Palpating these balancing practices and membranes through participant observation and interviews, experience and experiments, this work attends to the training of sensitivity and habit across fields of research and training, structures and sensibilities.

Biosketch: Joseph Dumit is chair of Performance Studies, and professor of Science & Technology Studies, and of Anthropology at University of California, Davis. His research and teaching ask how exactly we come to think, do, and speak the way we do about ourselves and our world; and what are the material ways we encounter facts and things, and take them to be relevant to our lives and our futures? He is the author of Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans & Biomedical America (Princeton 2004), Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Duke 2012), and co-editor of Cyborgs & Citadels: Cyborg Babies and Biomedicine as Culture. His current research includes comparative anatomies and the study of fascia via movement and improvisation, capitalism and health, three-dimensional visualization (virtual reality) environments for science, and game studies. He is developing a game on fracking at http://modlab.ucdavis.edu, a book on playing with methods, and is in the process of creating an undergraduate program in Data Studies, which will help undergrads learn to think critically and computationally about data. http://dumit.net

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:01:27 -0400 2018-10-22T16:00:00-04:00 2018-10-22T17:30:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Science, Technology & Society Lecture / Discussion Prof. Dumit
Medieval Lunch."Jacopo de' Barbari and the Limits of Knowledge" & "I Blu di Genova: The Lenten Tradition of San Nicolo del Boschetto" (October 23, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55585 55585-13759172@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, October 23, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS)

The Medieval Lunch Series is an informal program for sharing works-in-progress and fostering community among medievalists at the University of Michigan. Faculty and graduate students from across disciplines participate, sharing their research and discussing ongoing projects.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 18 Sep 2018 14:47:18 -0400 2018-10-23T12:00:00-04:00 2018-10-23T12:50:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) Workshop / Seminar Barbari painting
EIHS Lecture: Is There a Socialist Everyday? Production and Social Reproduction in Maoist Beijing (October 25, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52315 52315-12631415@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, October 25, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Abstract: In the years between 1958 and 1962, the Urban Commune movement was promoted as a radical effort to change the daily lives of city residents. By inserting women into the “productive” life of factory work, the movement also aimed at achieving a new form of everyday, based on a true equality of gender relationships, one achieved through the shared creativity of manual labor. While the movement failed, it nonetheless brought to the fore some of the crucial tensions that marred the search for a socialist everyday: between participatory democracy and state hierarchy, between production and liberation, and between labor and gender equality.

Fabio Lanza (PhD, Columbia University, 2004) is professor of modern Chinese history in the Departments of History and East Asian Studies of the University of Arizona. He is the author of Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (Columbia University Press, 2010) and of The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies (Duke University Press, 2017). He also co-edited (with Jadwiga Pieper-Mooney) De-Centering Cold War History Local and Global Change (Routledge, 2013).

Free and open to the public.

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

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 17 Oct 2018 07:51:57 -0400 2018-10-25T16:00:00-04:00 2018-10-25T18:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Fabio Lanza
EIHS Workshop: Boundaries of Everyday Life (October 26, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54012 54012-13513094@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 26, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Taking up Fabio Lanza’s question–is there a socialist everyday?–this panel will explore the nature, meanings, and boundaries of “everyday life” as it has been imagined and theorized by a wide array of scholars and historical actors. In contexts ranging from early Soviet linguistic theory to China’s Cultural Revolution to European Maoism, panelists ask: What is everyday life? Where does it begin and end, and what is its relationship with socialist ideologies and practices? What are its limitations as an interpretive category?

Panelists:
A.C. Baecker, PhD Candidate, Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan
Fedor Maksimishin, PhD Student, History, University of Michigan
David Spreen, PhD Candidate, History, University of Michigan
Fabio Lanza (respondent), Professor, History, East Asian Studies, University of Arizona
Johanna Folland (chair), PhD Candidate, History, University of Michigan

Free and open to the public. Lunch provided.

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

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Workshop / Seminar Thu, 18 Oct 2018 14:43:34 -0400 2018-10-26T12:00:00-04:00 2018-10-26T14:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop / Seminar Window Picture
Luisa Coleta and the Capuchin Friar (October 26, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54164 54164-13537237@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 26, 2018 3:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

In 2016 Rebecca Scott and Cuban historian Carlos Venegas came upon a record of the “confession” of María Luisa Coleta, a refugee from the Haitian Revolution who had been unlawfully enslaved in 1796, as narrated to Friar Félix, who had been summoned to her deathbed in Havana. Coleta declined to accept last rites, however, unless the friar would return with a scribe to copy down her story and take the document to a judge to initiate a freedom suit on behalf of her daughters, so that they would not suffer what she had suffered. The many folios of that lawsuit form the basis for the present essay, complemented by documents from France, England, and the Dominican Republic that trace the Atlantic dimension to this story. Together they cast light on the complexities of discerning and documenting status in the Atlantic world in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution.

A paper will be circulated in advance of the workshop; please contact Michael Gawlik (mrgawlik@umich.edu) if you would like a copy.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 24 Oct 2018 08:30:20 -0400 2018-10-26T15:00:00-04:00 2018-10-26T16:30:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Workshop / Seminar Tisch Hall
There's Always Someone Who Doesn't Want You To Vote (October 30, 2018 6:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56912 56912-14023821@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, October 30, 2018 6:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

In democracies, ours included, voting is free, equal and secret – except when it’s not. A panel of distinguished scholars will discuss the subtle and not so subtle ways in which voting rights continue to be undermined in the context of a long history of electoral interferences, voter suppression, discouragement, and intimidation. They will discuss the deliberate targeting of particular groups and individuals as well as structural and infrastructural infringements on voting rights.

Panel Discussion Featuring:
Vincent L. Hutchings (Political Science, University of Michigan)
Rebecca Scott (History, School of Law; University of Michigan)
Michael J. Steinberg (Legal Director, American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan)
Heather Ann Thompson (Afroamerican and African Studies, History, Residential College; University of Michigan)
Matthew Countryman (moderator; Afroamerican and African Studies, American Culture, History; University of Michigan)

Free and open to the public.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 26 Oct 2018 09:15:30 -0400 2018-10-30T18:00:00-04:00 2018-10-30T20:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Lecture / Discussion poster_crop
A War Remembered: Biafra at 50 (November 1, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/57054 57054-14077265@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, November 1, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

By some estimates, the Nigerian Civil War was the greatest catastrophe ever to have occurred in Africa. Over the June, 1967 to January, 1970 period, the conflict may have claimed as many as two million lives. This presentation will be delivered by a former relief officer of the International Committee of the Red Cross who participated in the Biafra relief action over the May to October, 1969 period as an entry-level logistics worker, and from November 1969 to July 1970 as a “UN Forward Observer” assigned to the Third Division of the Nigerian Army. The presentation outlines causes and consequences of the conflict, procedures followed by the relief action, and examples of strategies that failed to have their intended impact. Lessons from Biafra attest to the value of implementation science in crisis situations.

Dr. James Phillips is currently Professor, Population and Family Health, Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health, Mailman School of Public Health where he teaches demography and directs research on health systems development in Africa. He has a Ph.D. in Sociology/Demography from the University of Michigan.

A reception will follow the event.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 15 Nov 2018 15:18:17 -0500 2018-11-01T16:00:00-04:00 2018-11-01T17:30:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Lecture / Discussion Tisch Hall
My Name is Afrika: Keorapetse Kgositsile, Black Arts Movement, and Polyglot Internationalism (November 5, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55995 55995-13814269@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, November 5, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Comparative Literature

South African national poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile’s work is firmly anchored in the Tswana oral and literary traditions shaped by a strong sense of community, customs and culture. I am interested in how he invigorates those traditions when in exile in the black diaspora (1962 – 1975), making his work stand out in the many black international journals and magazines he published in, thus necessitating a different lens of reading those print cultures previously delineated as African American. I demonstrate how he extends and interweaves the indigenous South African resource base with diasporic artistic traditions, tasking us to rethink genealogies of African knowledge production, their generative value and currency in the black radical imagination, and their translation and influence in black internationalism. My mission is to show how Kgositsile’s transatlantic engagements brought his black diaspora contemporaries into locution with a distinctly Tswana consciousness and epistemologies, transforming his interlocutors and the vision of their social movements. This way I establish a model of reading South Africa’s relationship with African Americans that eschews a “counterculture to modernity” born in the Northern Atlantic, rebutting a vertical North to South influence common in such transnational readings.

Uhuru Phalafala (PhD, University of Cape Town) is a lecturer in the English department at Stellenbosch University. She is the 2018 University of Michigan African Presidential Scholar, and 2019 African Humanities Program fellow. Her research interests are transnationalism, black internationalism, translation, decoloniality, and world literatures. She currently heads a Mellon-funded research project ‘Recovering Subterranean Archives’, which investigates South African culture in exile, with the ultimate goal of repatriating and republishing it. She is currently working on her book project Crossing Borders Without Leaving, a critical biography of South African writer-in-exile Keorapetse Kgositsile.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 01 Nov 2018 11:05:09 -0400 2018-11-05T12:00:00-05:00 2018-11-05T13:30:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Comparative Literature Lecture / Discussion Uhuru Phalafala poster
Medieval Lunch. Stop and Spoilate: Ends and Beginnings in the Late Roman/Early Medieval Houses of Central Italy (November 6, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55586 55586-13759174@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, November 6, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS)

The Medieval Lunch Series is an informal program for sharing works-in-progress and fostering community among medievalists at the University of Michigan. Faculty and graduate students from across disciplines participate, sharing their research and discussing ongoing projects.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 18 Sep 2018 15:04:39 -0400 2018-11-06T12:00:00-05:00 2018-11-06T12:50:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) Workshop / Seminar Tisch Hall
EIHS Lecture: Peacetime Aerial Bombing: A Colonial Genealogy for the Ever-Disappearing Civilian (November 8, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52316 52316-12631416@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, November 8, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Abstract: This talk examines the "peacetime" interwar aerial bombing of Waziristan, and in particular its visual archive, to interrogate a colonial genealogy of “civilian” and her chronic disappearance in some arenas of war. If Paul Virilio considered the complicity of the airplane and the camera in constituting a "military field of perception," it has largely been historically accounted for through the aerial bombing of European cities. Yet such a field of perception was simultaneously forged in colonial landscapes, amidst the expansion of Geneva conventions to address new technologies of war and fierce debates on colonial technologies of rule. In a forensic search for the "civilian" in contingent antiwar and anticolonial solidarities of the time, can one ground the aerial view to a different kind of accountability?

Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar is a historian of modern South Asia at Brown University, with an interest in twentieth century histories of decolonization, nation-state formation, displacement, war, resistance and the visual archive. Her book, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories, was published by Columbia University Press in 2007, the Indian and Pakistani editions of the book came out in 2008, and the Urdu translation in 2014. Stories from the book have also been performed by the Delhi-based, Dastangoi. While minorities, partitions, and refugees remain enduring concerns, she is presently working on a book on the history of archaeology, visual practices and war on the northwest frontier of British India, on the borderlands with Afghanistan, and has received the International Institute of Asian Studies Fellowship, the Fulbright, and the National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship, amongst others, for this project.

Free and open to the public.

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

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 23 Oct 2018 09:23:08 -0400 2018-11-08T16:00:00-05:00 2018-11-08T18:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Vazira F-Y Zamindar
The Shape of Knowledge: Moving Blackness Against the Line in Diaspora Studies (November 8, 2018 4:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55994 55994-13814268@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, November 8, 2018 4:30pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Comparative Literature

In this talk Michelle M. Wright will argue that it is the way we tend to frame knowledge--both its formation and its progress--that hinders our ability to both research and represent the contributions not only of marginalized collectives, but those further marginalized within that collective. Drawing from her book Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, Wright interrogates the linear and explores the possibilities of what she terms "Epiphenomenal" spacetime.

Michelle M. Wright is the Augustus Baldwin Longstreet Professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where she teaches courses on gender, sexuality and race in the Black and African Diaspora.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 01 Nov 2018 11:06:44 -0400 2018-11-08T16:30:00-05:00 2018-11-08T18:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Comparative Literature Lecture / Discussion Shape of Knowledge Poster
CompLit Alumni Panel (November 9, 2018 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/54490 54490-13589891@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 9, 2018 10:00am
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Comparative Literature

Join CompLit PhD alumni Başak Çandar, Amr Kamal, Christopher Meade, and Michelle Wright as they reflect on their graduate school experiences.

Başak Çandar is Assistant Professor of English at Appalachian State University.

Amr Kamal is Assistant Professor of French and Arabic at the City College of New York.

Christopher Meade is Assistant Professor of English at Appalachian State University.

Michelle Wright is the Augustus Baldwin Longstreet Professor of English at Emory University.

This event is for CompLit graduate students.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 01 Nov 2018 11:00:50 -0400 2018-11-09T10:00:00-05:00 2018-11-09T12:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Comparative Literature Lecture / Discussion Tisch Hall
EIHS Workshop: History Between Disciplines: An EIHS Exploration of Methodology (November 9, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54014 54014-13513116@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 9, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

By examining the possibilities and pitfalls of working within and across disciplines, this workshop provides a forum for discussing historical methodologies. Featuring mini-talks by five graduate students in History, Anthropology and History, and Greek and Roman History on topics from a wide range of chronologies and geographies, please join us for a lively conversation about how we do what we do.

Panelists:
Farida Begum, PhD Candidate, History, University of Michigan
Ren Chao, PhD Student, History, University of Michigan
Amanda Respess, PhD Candidate, Anthropology and History, University of Michigan
William Soergel, PhD Student, Greek and Roman History, University of Michigan
Parrish Wright, PhD Student, Greek and Roman History, University of Michigan
Vazira Zamindar (respondent), Associate Professor, History, Brown University
Matthew Woodbury (chair), Postdoctoral Fellow, Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, Department of History, University of Michigan

Free and open to the public. Lunch provided.

Together with Professor Zamindar’s Thursday lecture, this workshop is part of a semester-long celebration of 30 years of Anthro-History at Michigan.

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

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 06 Nov 2018 13:43:16 -0500 2018-11-09T12:00:00-05:00 2018-11-09T14:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop / Seminar architecture
Transcultural Studies Information Session (November 13, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/57100 57100-14092925@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, November 13, 2018 3:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Program in Transcultural Studies

The Program in Transcultural Studies is an accelerated master's degree program designed for LSA undergraduate students. Students choose courses offered by eleven participating departments related to the themes of Connectivity, Comparison, and Translation. Join us for an information session to learn more!

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Meeting Fri, 26 Oct 2018 09:51:30 -0400 2018-11-13T15:00:00-05:00 2018-11-13T17:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Program in Transcultural Studies Meeting Tisch Hall
Against the New Nativism (November 13, 2018 5:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/57518 57518-14209018@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, November 13, 2018 5:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

The U.S. government is currently checking off items on the wish list of a new nativist movement--from an entry ban on people from majority-Muslim countries to mass arrests and deportations, from major reductions in refugee admissions to new rules designed to restrict working people's access to legal status. These rapid changes to immigration policy reflect a long history of efforts, in the United States and around the world, to constrain the movement of people across borders. As elected officials and news outlets cite nativist "think-tanks" and proclaim an immigration "crisis," this teach-in is an opportunity to participate in a conversation about what is happening locally and globally and how people are organizing in response.

Sponsored by the Migration & Displacement Interdisciplinary Workshop, Global Solidarity After Colonialism RIW, and TriContinental Solidarity Network

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Workshop / Seminar Thu, 08 Nov 2018 08:11:36 -0500 2018-11-13T17:00:00-05:00 2018-11-13T19:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Workshop / Seminar Tisch Hall