Happening @ Michigan https://events.umich.edu/list/rss RSS Feed for Happening @ Michigan Events at the University of Michigan. EIHS Workshop: Crisis, Community, and Recovery: Past and Present (November 5, 2021 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/85458 85458-21626477@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 5, 2021 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Format: This event will take place via Zoom webinar. Register here: https://myumi.ch/ovXgd

Description: Crises, acute and chronic, are moments of ruptures that destabilize our sense and experience of time and space. Conceptually, crisis is one of the key concepts that help us think, re-think, and write about the past as well as the present. Does the experience of living through crises and disasters transform the way historians conduct their craft? What is the role of historical writing in the present moment of crisis, and in post-crisis recoveries? How has the COVID-19 pandemic made us rethink past ruptures of time and place, or past ruptures our present moment? For whom and for what purpose do we write histories of crises and recovery? How have communities envisioned and experienced processes of post-crisis recovery, and is recovery even possible? All of these questions have the potential to invigorate us in a lively debate on the purpose and politics of our discipline while also reflecting on some of the key conceptual categories that have theoretical and methodological implications for the writing of history.

Panelists:
• Richard A. Bachmann (Graduate Student, History, University of Michigan)
• Bryan Goh (Graduate Student, History, University of Michigan)
• Mix Mann (Graduate Student, History, University of Michigan)
• ToniAnn Treviño (Graduate Student, History, University of Michigan)
• Hitomi Tonomura (moderator; Professor; History, Women's and Gender Studies; University of Michigan)

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

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 26 Oct 2021 10:22:56 -0400 2021-11-05T12:00:00-04:00 2021-11-05T14:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop / Seminar "Farmlands," James Lesesne Wells, circa 1935-1943
Brendan Goff Book Event: Rotary International and the Selling of American Capitalism (November 18, 2021 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/88959 88959-21659311@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, November 18, 2021 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

Debates over the rise and fall of US empire continue to pervade headlines as well as academia. More recently, many scholars have come to recognize the history of capitalism as its own field of inquiry. In his book, Rotary International and the Selling of American Capitalism (HUP, 2021), Brendan Goff seeks to bring these two timely and evolving fields together through a close examination of the origins, growth, and expansion of Rotary clubs throughout the world during the first half of the twentieth century. When placed within the pre-war context of local and regional forms of boosterism, transnational business and social networks, civic and managerial discourses, and racialized and gendered forms of economic citizenship, local Rotary clubs proved to be anything but local, serving instead as nodal points for internationalist ambitions from towns and cities to nations and empires, from small businessmen to multi-national corporations.

That thousands of independent clubs operated worldwide through Rotary International, their administrative core based in Chicago, rather than through any formal arrangement with the US government, the US military, or its foreign policy elites proved invaluable in maintaining a strategic distance from the state. At the same time, what Goff calls Rotary’s civic internationalism promoted an idealized form of small-town, Main Street values that helped re-brand corporate capitalism as the central driver of progressive change in the world by mid- century. In this manner, Rotary International—a non-governmental organization—helped stabilize and advance both US national interests as well as US-based corporations and industries in a period of rapid global ascendancy.

Brendan Goff received his PhD in history at the University of Michigan in 2008. Before moving to New College of Florida in 2011 as a Visiting Assistant Professor, Dr. Goff held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Michigan and was a lecturer in the Great Books Program at the University of Michigan. From 2014 to 2021, Dr. Goff also served as Assistant Professor at New College of Florida. Before entering the PhD program at Michigan, Dr. Goff worked as a freelance English teacher in Madrid, at a major bank in New York City, and in the Government and Community Affairs Division at the Children’s Defense Fund in Washington, DC. He also studied philosophy at the University of Glasgow as an Ambassadorial Scholar with Rotary International and attended seminary shortly after graduating from Hamilton College. Dr. Goff’s book, Rotary International and the Selling of American Capitalism, was published by Harvard University Press in July of 2021.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 04 Nov 2021 11:35:29 -0400 2021-11-18T16:00:00-05:00 2021-11-18T18:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Lecture / Discussion Rotary International and the Selling of American Capitalism
EIHS Workshop: Burn It Down!: The Un/Making of Knowledge and Power (December 3, 2021 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/85460 85460-21626479@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, December 3, 2021 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Format: This is a hybrid event. Attend in person in 1014 Tisch Hall (no registration required) or stream via Zoom: https://myumi.ch/z1VQA

Nationalism uses mythology to bind together different peoples and ideals under a national identity. The mythos requires meaning-making, differentiating between acceptable and transgressive, and creating knowledge that can be passed down to maintain and sustain the national identity as canon: it is a foundation. But when the foundation of the mythology is damaged, harmful, or fabricated, the threads of knowledge passed down construct an unsustainable home. When the walls of this mythology keep and parcel out those who are, in essence, included in the floorplan of the nation, burning the house down may be the only logical form of recovery. Rather than a dissolutionary extreme, Professor Padilla Peralta and other Greco-Roman Classicists of color envision, like bell hooks, a whole new homeplace of yearning and resistance. Therefore, policy and politics of presence, not absence, define pathways forward.

This Eisenberg Institute panel features papers that interrogate disciplines and their canonical and institutional systems of knowledge in the fields of Greco-Egyptian religion, medieval England, eighteenth-century Russia, and American colonial Philippines.

Panelists:
• Megan Behrend (PhD Candidate, English Language and Literature, University of Michigan)
• Robert Diaz (PhD Student, History, University of Michigan)
• Dora Gao (PhD Student, Ancient History, University of Michigan)
• Forrest Holden (PhD Candidate, History, University of Michigan)
• Ian S. Moyer (moderator; Associate Professor, History, University of Michigan)

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

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Workshop / Seminar Thu, 02 Dec 2021 12:32:02 -0500 2021-12-03T12:00:00-05:00 2021-12-03T14:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop / Seminar The Burning of the Custom House, Queen Square (William James Muller)
STS Speaker. Science-in-Vivo: Experimental Methods for the 'Bananapocalypse (December 6, 2021 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/86398 86398-21634172@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, December 6, 2021 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Science, Technology & Society

Fusarium Wilt Tropical Race Four is a deadly soil-borne fungal disease that has stumped the global banana industry. While pesticides are systematically employed to control the spread of disease on plantations, the failures to develop a chemical control for Fusarium Wilt has exposed the paradigm limits of conventional agricultural science. In this talk, I introduce the notion of ‘science-in-vivo’, a method of experimentation that has emerged in the context of Philippine banana plantations ravaged by the ‘incurable’ fungal disease. Literally ‘science within the living body’, the method combines secular and non-secular thought, and gathers human, nonhuman, and extrahuman forces in ways that break down some of the hegemonic antagonisms that define plantation life. I argue that renewed scientific sensibility offers a way to expand local strategies for transformative activist praxis in a sector where political horizons have only narrowed. The method was inspired, originally, by a series of God-given dreams about microbes in the forests of southern Mindanao.

Bio: Alyssa Paredes is LSA Collegiate Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she will be Assistant Professor in 2022. Her research concerns the human, environmental, and metabolic infrastructures of transnational trade between the Philippines and Japan. Her first book project, preliminarily titled Bananapocalypse: Plantation Commodities and the Conceit of Ecological Externality, identifies the conventions of crop science, agrochemical regulation, market segmentation techniques, and food standards as arenas where actors contend over the commodity chain’s production calculus. Her work appears in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, the Journal of Political Ecology, the Journal of Material Culture, as well as in edited collections such as Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene (Stanford, 2020), The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Duke, forthcoming 2022), and the Japanese-language volume 甘いバナナの苦い現実 [The Bitter Reality of Sweet Bananas] (Commons, 2020). She holds a PhD with distinction from Yale University.

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 29 Nov 2021 08:59:04 -0500 2021-12-06T16:00:00-05:00 2021-12-06T17:30:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Science, Technology & Society Lecture / Discussion A scientist in vivo. Photo by Isidro
EIHS Lecture: Writing the Past-Perfect: Memoir and the Making of a Meaningful Past (February 24, 2022 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/85512 85512-21626798@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, February 24, 2022 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Format: This lecture is presented in hybrid format: in-person in 1014 Tisch Hall and virtual via Zoom webinar (register: https://myumi.ch/Ek82M).

Description: Questions about the relationship between historical memory and slavery have become increasingly acute in a political environment where thinly veiled claims to racial purity have been weaponized to proscribe the boundaries of national citizenship. At the same time, various protest movements have demanded that we reconsider the violent legacy of racism that is enshrined, commemorated, and memorialized in this country. In this talk, Jason Young argues that much of what we have inherited as the sights, sounds, and symbols of slavery are of very recent provenance, much of it produced by influential myth-makers in the early twentieth century who responded to the racial anxieties of their day by weaponizing their memories of the antebellum past. The themes explored in this talk continue to have great currency in the current moment when debates about historical memory, race and slavery are being waged both in the arena of popular culture as well as in the halls of academia.

Biography: Jason R. Young is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcounrty Region of Georgia and South Carolina in the Era of Slavery, an exploration into the religious and ritual practices that linked Kongo with South Carolina in the era of slavery. He is the co-editor, with Edward J. Blum, of The Souls of W.E.B. Du Bois: New Essays and Reflections. Professor Young has published articles in the Journal of African American History, Journal of Africana Religions and Journal of Southern Religion among others. He is currently conducting research toward his next book project, "'To Make the Slave Anew': Art, History and the Politics of Authenticity."

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

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 15 Feb 2022 09:51:31 -0500 2022-02-24T16:00:00-05:00 2022-02-24T18:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Jason Young
EIHS Symposium: Humanities-in-Recovery: The Case for Engaged Scholarship (February 25, 2022 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/85513 85513-21626801@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 25, 2022 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Format: This lecture is presented in hybrid format: in-person in 1014 Tisch Hall and virtual via Zoom webinar (register: https://myumi.ch/bRV1e).

Description: The humanities have been in a state of “permanent crisis,” or so it seems. Yet the modern humanities were themselves conceived as a bulwark against a crisis of meaning and value. The current pandemic crisis has raised anew questions about the purpose of the humanities and what value they provide to society. Our multidisciplinary panel will engage with the question of the role of the humanities in relation to society. What is the role of engaged scholarship in this context? How can it avoid the mere instrumentalization of complex artifacts and problematics? The panelists will address these questions and more in the context of their own work.

Panelists:
• Peter Blackmer (Assistant Professor, Africology and African American Studies, Eastern Michigan University)
• Amal Hassan Fadlalla (Professor; Afroamerican and African Studies, Anthropology, Women's and Gender Studies; University of Michigan)
• Ricky Punzalan (Associate Professor of Information, School of Information, University of Michigan)
• Anna Bonnell Freidin (moderator; Assistant Professor, History, University of Michigan)

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

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Conference / Symposium Wed, 16 Feb 2022 08:46:06 -0500 2022-02-25T12:00:00-05:00 2022-02-25T14:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Conference / Symposium Tisch Hall
EIHS Lecture: "All the Devils this Side of Hades": Minnie Geddings Cox and Black Finance in the 1920s (March 10, 2022 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/85515 85515-21626802@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, March 10, 2022 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Format: This lecture is presented in hybrid format: in-person in 1014 Tisch Hall and virtual via Zoom webinar (register: https://myumi.ch/n8V68).

Description: By 1920, Minnie Geddings Cox led a financial empire that included a wildly successful, Black-owned insurance company and bank. Few women of any race could boast of such an accomplishment. In 1923, she attempted a merger that would have made her Mississippi Life Insurance Company the largest Black-owned insurance company in the country. She could not have foreseen the daunting challenges poised to thwart her vision: from white regulators and businesses anxious to cash in on Black success to self-proclaimed Negro Captains of Industry determined that they—and not a woman—would remain the avatars of Negro progress in a Jim Crow financial world.

Biography: Shennette Garrett-Scott is committed to telling little-known stories of early Black business. She is an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University and the author of the multiple award-winning book Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance before the New Deal, published by Columbia University Press in 2019. She is working on an upcoming book tentatively titled Black Enterprise: Black Capitalism in the Making of Modern America, which will be published by W.W. Norton. She has published widely in scholarly journals, popular magazines, and online blogs. Follow her on Twitter at EbonRebel.

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

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 28 Feb 2022 08:01:06 -0500 2022-03-10T16:00:00-05:00 2022-03-10T18:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Shennette Garrett-Scott
EIHS Workshop: Institutional Access and Autonomy (March 11, 2022 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/85516 85516-21626803@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 11, 2022 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Format: Format: This lecture is presented in hybrid format: in-person in 1014 Tisch Hall and virtual via Zoom webinar (register: https://myumi.ch/QeMXr).

Description: This workshop brings together graduate students from history, sociology, and anthropology who study questions of institutional access and autonomy in a panel of lightning talks, followed by an informal discussion and audience Q&A.

These talks will focus on a series of case studies that explore how access to political and economic institutions vary between individuals and communities. The panelists will address the National Domestic Workers Union and the Black Freedom Movement; the race and economic politics of Emergency Management in Michigan; homework and the social politics of breadwinner liberalism; the intersection of social capital and gender in French bankruptcy courts; and market liberalism and Black capitalism.

Panelists:
• John Finkelberg (Graduate Student, History, University of Michigan)
• Luis Flores Jr. (Graduate Student, Sociology, University of Michigan)
• Reuben Riggs-Bookman (Graduate Student, History, University of Michigan)
• Eshe Sherley (Graduate Student, History, University of Michigan)
• Matt Carlos Stehney (Graduate Student, History, University of Michigan)
• Rita Chin (moderator; Professor, History, University of Michigan)

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

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 28 Feb 2022 08:01:47 -0500 2022-03-11T12:00:00-05:00 2022-03-11T14:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop / Seminar Tisch Hall
STS Speaker. "And the other face was terrible": Risking the Future and Colonizing the Past in the Nuclear Southwest (March 21, 2022 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/90476 90476-21671178@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, March 21, 2022 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Science, Technology & Society

In the early twentieth century, tourists traveled to the US Southwest in search of a “vanishing way of life” that they associated with Indigenous traditions and rugged adventure on what many saw as the nation’s last frontier. The Indigenous textiles and pottery that became popular in US consumer culture were a symbolic resource, as were Indigenous ancestral sites and artifacts excavated in what archaeologist Berenika Byszewski terms “the colonization of antiquity as a national and scientific space.” The rush for art and artifacts anticipated another rush that would soon engulf the Southwest. When the first nuclear test shot was fired at White Sands, New Mexico, in 1945, the atomic age dawned with the desert as its ground zero.

There were two American Southwests, one a source of natural and cultural riches, the other an absorber of radiation, from slag to fallout. Yet the two Southwests were twined together in the everyday lives of residents. This talk looks at the careers of two nuclear scientists who exemplify this entanglement. The first, Francis Harlow, was a Los Alamos physicist who studied Pueblo pottery in his spare time, becoming a national authority on it. The second is Floy Agnes Naranjo Lee, also a researcher at Los Alamos. Lee devoted her career to studying the health effects of radiation. Lee’s family came from the nearby Pueblo of Santa Clara, and she was one of the few Native people working in technical jobs during the Manhattan Project. Configured around Aziz Rana's image of the "two faces of American freedom," these stories illuminate how the nation's survival was made contingent on the appropriation of Indigenous pasts and futures.

Alicia Puglionesi is a writer and historian. She earned a PhD in the history of science, medicine, and technology from Johns Hopkins University in 2015 and has taught at Johns Hopkins and MICA. Her first book, Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science, explores how the practices of seances, clairvoyance, and telepathy both questioned and reinscribed social boundaries. She lives in Baltimore.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 10 Mar 2022 10:32:53 -0500 2022-03-21T16:00:00-04:00 2022-03-21T17:30:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Science, Technology & Society Lecture / Discussion Dr. Alicia Puglionese
EIHS Lecture: "The Things to Come": Francisco Solano Faces Irremediable Humanity (March 24, 2022 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/85550 85550-21626840@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, March 24, 2022 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Format: This lecture is presented in hybrid format: in-person in 1014 Tisch Hall and virtual via Zoom webinar (register: https://myumi.ch/bRb7x).

Description: Lima, Peru, 1605. What matters when the coincidence of an apocalyptic sermon by a famous holy man and a visiting orchestrator of devotion turns out to have been largely invented to serve the needs of the latter and the readers for whom he dreamed? Perched between the prospects of recovery and oblivion, a public mindset emerges that illuminates the early modern Spanish world and speaks to our times.

Biography: Kenneth Mills (D.Phil Oxon, 1992), J. Frederick Hoffman Professor of History, investigates the histories of the early modern Iberian world and of colonial Latin America. His emphases fall on religious and cultural transformations, and on the interpretation of people's thinking and interactions within idiosyncratically and fragmentarily reported episodes. Professor Mills's scholarship is notable for its trans-oceanic vision and its cross-disciplinary curiosity. His recent published works include the multi-author and multi-discipline Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation, coordinated and edited with Evonne Levy (University of Texas Press, 2013).

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

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 15 Mar 2022 06:48:17 -0400 2022-03-24T16:00:00-04:00 2022-03-24T18:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Saint Francisco Solano, unidentified artist, engraving, eighteenth century (PESSCA 4586).
EIHS Symposium: Whither Critical Disaster Studies? (March 25, 2022 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/85519 85519-21626806@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 25, 2022 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Format: This event is presented in hybrid format: in-person in 1014 Tisch Hall and virtual via Zoom webinar (register: https://myumi.ch/M9zd4).

Description: The interdisciplinary field of critical disaster studies both builds on and expands long-standing work on disasters in a variety of disciplines. Its critical contribution lies in raising several first-order questions that have often been taken for granted: Why are some things defined as disasters and others are not? What is the assumed temporality in naming something as a disaster? How are disasters represented and experienced? How do particular understandings of disasters impact post-disaster recoveries? Our multi-disciplinary panel will explore these questions and more as each panelist engages the field from the perspective of their area of specialization.

Panelists:
• Matthew Ghazarian (Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Armenian Studies, University of Michigan)
• Susan Scott Parrish (Professor; English Language and Literature, University of Michigan)
• Dean Yang (Professor of Public Policy and Economics, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan)
• Melanie Tanielian (moderator; Associate Professor, History, University of Michigan)

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

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Conference / Symposium Wed, 16 Mar 2022 09:36:41 -0400 2022-03-25T12:00:00-04:00 2022-03-25T14:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Conference / Symposium "cracks," a.dombrowski (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Aiton Lecture: “Civil War and Radical Reaction: the Confederate States of America and Mexico’s Second Empire” (March 31, 2022 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/93323 93323-21702629@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, March 31, 2022 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

In the 1850s and 1860s, North America was transformed by war, political crises and constitutional overhaul. We will explore two radical political experiments that meant to deal with the era’s chaos: the Confederate States of America and Mexico’s Second Empire.

Erika Pani (PhD, El Colegio de México, 1998) is research professor at El Colegio de México. Her research and teaching focus is on nineteenth century politics, Mexico’s Second Empire, Conservatism and citizenship. She has published the Historia minima de los Estados Unidos de América (2016).

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 14 Mar 2022 11:58:45 -0400 2022-03-31T16:00:00-04:00 2022-03-31T18:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Lecture / Discussion French battle-field painter Jean Adolphe Beaucé depicts the 1865 meeting between Maximilian and the Kickapoo embassy which had traveled to Mexico City.
STS Speaker. Of Canals, Rivers, and the Right to Exist: Histories of Science and Technology for a Changed World. (April 4, 2022 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/92137 92137-21687050@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, April 4, 2022 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Science, Technology & Society

In the mid 1960s seeds from an experimental station in northern Mexico helped launch the Green Revolution. Use of these high-yielding seeds transformed farming from Latin America to South Asia. Their status as "miracle" seeds was challenged in a few years when excessive use of fertilizer and pesticides wreaked havoc on the environment and had lasting social impacts on farming communities across the globe. While many have written about the Green Revolution and its consequences, how do we construct historical narratives of such events? This talk will interrogate whose narratives are erased and which survive by examining the contexts of overshadowed histories of the so-called Green Revolution.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 24 Mar 2022 10:08:19 -0400 2022-04-04T16:00:00-04:00 2022-04-04T17:30:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Science, Technology & Society Lecture / Discussion Prof. Gabriela Soto Laveaga
STS Speaker. Birth of a Notation: Charting Human and Machine Failure at the Dawn of the Jazz Age (April 11, 2022 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/90031 90031-21667627@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, April 11, 2022 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Science, Technology & Society

This talk examines how one of the central graphic technologies of Scientific Management and of modern project consulting — the Gantt Chart — grew out of attempts to create intricate psychic and cultural linkages between two kinds of failure in Progressive-Era America: failure as a condition of industrial machinery, and failure as a kind of person. For its creator, Henry Gantt, the chart ultimately formed part of a project of racial containment: a vision that kept black workers out of northern factories by encoding a relationship between whiteness and efficiency and providing a graphic formalism for white racial uplift. Against the backdrop of the Great Migration, the charts combined with racist union practices, anxieties about black mobility, and fears of racial degeneration to create northern industrial concerns as closed white democracies that cultivated a specific kind of technological self. Linking those developments to our own worries in the early-21st century, the talk encourages us to see the history of modern technology as a history of the intersections between failing machines and historical selves, and of the social orders and dystopias they both made possible.

Bio: Edward Jones-Imhotep is a historian of the social and cultural life of machines and Director of the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. He writes about topics ranging from the history of music studios and artificial life to space technologies and the technological geographies of islands. His research is particularly interested in histories of technological failure — breakdowns, malfunctions, accidents — and what they reveal about the place of machines and the stakes of machine failures in the culture, politics, and economics of modern societies. He is the recipient of the Society for the History of Technology’s Sidney Edelstein Prize for his book, The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War (MIT Press, 2017), and the Abbot Payson Usher Prize for his article, “Malleability and Machines: Glenn Gould and the Technological Self.” His current book project, Unreliable Humans/Fallible Machines, examines how people from the late-18th to the mid-20th centuries understood machine failures as a problem of the self — a problem of the kinds of people that failing machines created, or threatened, or presupposed.

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 16 Mar 2022 09:07:52 -0400 2022-04-11T16:00:00-04:00 2022-04-11T17:30:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Science, Technology & Society Lecture / Discussion Henry Laurence Gantt, Work, Wages, and Profits (New York: The Engineering Magazine, 1910), Chart I.
EIHS Lecture: Little Ice Age and the Oyo Empire: An Unfinished Process of Recovery in West Africa, ca. 1420-1840 (April 14, 2022 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/85520 85520-21626808@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, April 14, 2022 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Presented with support from the African Studies Center.

This lecture is presented in hybrid format: in-person in 1014 Tisch Hall and virtual via Zoom webinar (register: https://myumi.ch/M9JPR).

This lecture highlights the crisis and aftermath of the Little Ice Age in West Africa, with emphasis on the ramifications it had for (1) the emergence and decline of the Oyo Empire and (2) the entanglement of the empire and the Bight of Benin in the early modern commercial revolution. The entire history of the Oyo Empire was shaped by the quest to cope with the erratic climatic regime of the Little Ice Age. What were the opportunities and limitations of these coping strategies, what Professor Ogundiran calls the unfinished process of recovery?

Akin Ogundiran is Chancellor’s Professor and Professor of Africana Studies, Anthropology, and History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Professor Ogundiran’s scholarship has focused primarily on the deep-time cultural history of the Yoruba world, Atlantic Africa, and the African Diaspora. His research has been supported by the National Geographic Society, American Institute of Archaeology, and American Philosophical Society, among others. He is also a past fellow of the National Humanities Center. Professor Ogundiran's latest book is The Yoruba: A New History (Indiana University Press, 2020).

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

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 07 Apr 2022 06:57:17 -0400 2022-04-14T16:00:00-04:00 2022-04-14T18:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Akinwumi Ogundiran
EIHS Workshop: Landscape, Indigenous Knowledge, and Power (April 15, 2022 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/85523 85523-21626810@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 15, 2022 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

This lecture is presented in hybrid format: in-person in 1014 Tisch Hall and virtual via Zoom webinar (register: https://myumi.ch/QeGR8).

Landscape constitutes an analytical category that reflects the double-way entanglement between human and environment. It specifies the geographical or spatial dimension while acknowledging human activities and their multivalent constructs of physical spaces. As Akinwumi Ogundiran writes in Power and Landscape in Atlantic West Africa, “landscapes do not exist a priori as a natural stage upon which social processes unfold. Rather, they are produced by human social and cultural practice.” In the light of Ogundiran’s pioneering works, this Eisenberg Institute roundtable panel calls attention to rethink landscape as a prism to understand diverse patterns of political, economic, social, and cultural structures that involve the formation and operation of knowledge-power systems in different historical settings.

This panel brings together graduate students from architecture, and history who, through the analytic of landscape, draw important connections between linguistic analysis, spatial continuities, geographic knowledge and histories of colonial power. These connections help them recover lost worlds of indigenous languages, technologies, labor, and skills.

Panelists:
• Deepthi Bathala (Graduate Student, Architecture, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan)
• Anne Marie Creighton (Graduate Student, Anthropology, University of Michigan)
• Jonathan Quint (Graduate Student, History, University of Michigan)
• Gregory E. Dowd (moderator; Helen Hornbeck Tanner Collegiate Professor; History, American Culture; University of Michigan)

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

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 08 Apr 2022 06:39:18 -0400 2022-04-15T12:00:00-04:00 2022-04-15T14:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop / Seminar Copy of a sketch of the Monongahela during the French and Indian War, ca. 1755.
Property and Being Under Colonial Conditions in Asia and Africa (May 13, 2022 9:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/94706 94706-21761599@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, May 13, 2022 9:00am
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

This conference will be hybrid. Join the Zoom meeting here: https://myumi.ch/1nMed

Historians have long proposed that property is as much about relationships between people as it is about the ownership of “things.” It is about both belonging, and belongings. Property offers a window onto contestations over power, social relations, resources, identity and political imagination. Histories of property in Asia and Africa, in particular, are intertwined with histories of colonial expansion, the emergence of new forms of state power, the creation of new categories/taxonomies of governance, the appropriation of indigenous lands, the reordering of social relations, and new or reworked imaginaries of property

The purpose of this interdisciplinary conference, “Property and Being under Colonial Conditions in Asia and Africa,” is to explore how comparing intellectual, cultural, social, political-economic, and legal histories of property from African and Asian colonial contexts may help us rethink ideas about land, ownership, dispossession, rights, credit, subjectivities, and political imaginations. Participants will engage with the historically sedimented entanglements of colonial policy and indigenous practices, developmentalist desires, and cultural and climatic change. Conversations across these regions may thus enable new understandings of property histories.

Schedule:

Friday 13 May, 2022

9:00  Arrival in 1014 Tisch Hall; pastries and coffee

9:30 Welcome 
Meenu Deswal and Tara Weinberg, University of Michigan

9:45 Panel I: Racial Logics of Property
Commentator: Brian Klein

Xafsa Ciise (University of California, Santa Cruz), “Species Extinction and Terrorism: The Political Economy of Conservation Wars in Africa”

Claire Cororaton (Cornell University), “On Property and the Philippine Democratic Experiment: Mateo Cariño’s Case and its Afterlives in Philippine History”

Sajdeep Soomal (University of Toronto), “Fatty Bitumen in Punjab”

11:45 Lunch (Provided)

13:00 Panel II: Of Collective Property, Communities, and Claim-Making 
Commentator: Jatin Dua

Amelia Burke (University of Michigan), “Titles, Rights and Shares: Individual Inheritance and Collective Lands in Colonial Morocco” 

Dipanjan Mazumder (Vanderbilt University), “A sacred history of property: Vernacular legal culture in early modern Bengal” 

Sauda Nabukenya (University of Michigan), “Struggles and strategies of the landless: contesting possession, and the framing of legal regimes in Buganda”

Tara Weinberg (University of Michigan), “Imaginaries of collective property ownership in South Africa: a history of land buying syndicates in the early 20th century”

15:00 - 15:15 Tea Break

15:15 Keynotes and Reflections on Day 1:
Rohit De and Nafisa Essop Sheik

Saturday 14 May, 2022

9:30 Arrival in 1014 Tisch Hall; Pastries and coffee

10:00 Panel III: Property, Contracts, and Being 
Commentator: Sanne Ravensbergen 

Fusheng Luo (University of Michigan), “A Tale of Two Settlements: The Formation of the Treaty Port Property Regimes in the British Settlements in Shanghai and Guangzhou”

Halimat Somotan (Carnegie Mellon University), “Property Owners, Renters, and Claims to Public Amenities in Colonial Lagos”

Lamin Manneh (University of Michigan), “‘Their reckless and dissipating husbands’: Property, marriage, and intercolonial trade in the British West African Settlements 1860-1888”

Meenu Deswal (University of Michigan), “Consent and the Question of Women as Property in Colonial Law, South Asia 1850-1920”

12:00 Break

12:15 Reflections on Day 2 and Conference Closing

13:00 Departure lunch – walk over to LSA canopy for lunch

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Conference / Symposium Thu, 05 May 2022 10:46:30 -0400 2022-05-13T09:00:00-04:00 2022-05-13T17:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Conference / Symposium Dusk in Hasangarh, outskirts of Delhi, c. 2003. Photo by Meenu Deswal
Property and Being Under Colonial Conditions in Asia and Africa (May 14, 2022 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/94706 94706-21761600@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, May 14, 2022 10:00am
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Department of History

This conference will be hybrid. Join the Zoom meeting here: https://myumi.ch/1nMed

Historians have long proposed that property is as much about relationships between people as it is about the ownership of “things.” It is about both belonging, and belongings. Property offers a window onto contestations over power, social relations, resources, identity and political imagination. Histories of property in Asia and Africa, in particular, are intertwined with histories of colonial expansion, the emergence of new forms of state power, the creation of new categories/taxonomies of governance, the appropriation of indigenous lands, the reordering of social relations, and new or reworked imaginaries of property

The purpose of this interdisciplinary conference, “Property and Being under Colonial Conditions in Asia and Africa,” is to explore how comparing intellectual, cultural, social, political-economic, and legal histories of property from African and Asian colonial contexts may help us rethink ideas about land, ownership, dispossession, rights, credit, subjectivities, and political imaginations. Participants will engage with the historically sedimented entanglements of colonial policy and indigenous practices, developmentalist desires, and cultural and climatic change. Conversations across these regions may thus enable new understandings of property histories.

Schedule:

Friday 13 May, 2022

9:00  Arrival in 1014 Tisch Hall; pastries and coffee

9:30 Welcome 
Meenu Deswal and Tara Weinberg, University of Michigan

9:45 Panel I: Racial Logics of Property
Commentator: Brian Klein

Xafsa Ciise (University of California, Santa Cruz), “Species Extinction and Terrorism: The Political Economy of Conservation Wars in Africa”

Claire Cororaton (Cornell University), “On Property and the Philippine Democratic Experiment: Mateo Cariño’s Case and its Afterlives in Philippine History”

Sajdeep Soomal (University of Toronto), “Fatty Bitumen in Punjab”

11:45 Lunch (Provided)

13:00 Panel II: Of Collective Property, Communities, and Claim-Making 
Commentator: Jatin Dua

Amelia Burke (University of Michigan), “Titles, Rights and Shares: Individual Inheritance and Collective Lands in Colonial Morocco” 

Dipanjan Mazumder (Vanderbilt University), “A sacred history of property: Vernacular legal culture in early modern Bengal” 

Sauda Nabukenya (University of Michigan), “Struggles and strategies of the landless: contesting possession, and the framing of legal regimes in Buganda”

Tara Weinberg (University of Michigan), “Imaginaries of collective property ownership in South Africa: a history of land buying syndicates in the early 20th century”

15:00 - 15:15 Tea Break

15:15 Keynotes and Reflections on Day 1:
Rohit De and Nafisa Essop Sheik

Saturday 14 May, 2022

9:30 Arrival in 1014 Tisch Hall; Pastries and coffee

10:00 Panel III: Property, Contracts, and Being 
Commentator: Sanne Ravensbergen 

Fusheng Luo (University of Michigan), “A Tale of Two Settlements: The Formation of the Treaty Port Property Regimes in the British Settlements in Shanghai and Guangzhou”

Halimat Somotan (Carnegie Mellon University), “Property Owners, Renters, and Claims to Public Amenities in Colonial Lagos”

Lamin Manneh (University of Michigan), “‘Their reckless and dissipating husbands’: Property, marriage, and intercolonial trade in the British West African Settlements 1860-1888”

Meenu Deswal (University of Michigan), “Consent and the Question of Women as Property in Colonial Law, South Asia 1850-1920”

12:00 Break

12:15 Reflections on Day 2 and Conference Closing

13:00 Departure lunch – walk over to LSA canopy for lunch

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Conference / Symposium Thu, 05 May 2022 10:46:30 -0400 2022-05-14T10:00:00-04:00 2022-05-14T13:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Department of History Conference / Symposium Dusk in Hasangarh, outskirts of Delhi, c. 2003. Photo by Meenu Deswal
STS Speaker. Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy (September 12, 2022 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/90018 90018-21794548@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, September 12, 2022 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Science, Technology & Society

Between the 1960s and the 1980s, an economic style of reasoning—one focused on efficiency, incentives, choice, and competition—became prominent within U.S. public policy, including in domains that were once not seen as particularly “economic”. Drawing on historical research on policy domains ranging from environmental to welfare to antitrust policy, I show how particular intellectual communities introduced and disseminated this style of reasoning, and examine its lasting political effects. As the values of economics—especially various forms of efficiency—became institutionalized through law, regulation and organizational change, it became harder for competing claims about rights, universalism, equity, and power to gain purchase. While economic reasoning had the potential to conflict with conservative as well as liberal values, in practice it was particularly constraining for the Democratic left—the implications of which continue to be felt. This talk will illustrate this larger argument with a focus on how these dynamics played out in the arena of social policy—welfare, health, housing, and education.

Bio: Elizabeth Popp Berman is Associate Professor of Organizational Studies and (by courtesy) Sociology at the University of Michigan. Her new book, Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy, will be published with Princeton University Press in March 2022.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 25 Aug 2022 11:03:23 -0400 2022-09-12T16:00:00-04:00 2022-09-12T17:30:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Science, Technology & Society Lecture / Discussion Popp Berman
EIHS Lecture: Commodified Communism: Values and Prices in the Polish People’s Republic (September 15, 2022 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/95286 95286-21789122@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, September 15, 2022 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Can a market society exist without commodifying human labor? That question has been debated by Marxist theoreticians for over a century, but in the Polish People’s Republic it penetrated even the most mundane policy discussions. The people who staffed the planning offices had to figure out what things were worth, and in the process they came to erase the line between values (in every sense of that word) and prices. They tried to pursue socialist goals with a neoclassical economic methodology, which even today is often defended as a viable strategy. Maybe it is, but in Poland it failed catastrophically.

Brian Porter-Szűcs is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History at the University of Michigan, where he has taught since 1994. His most recent book is Całkiem zwyczajny kraj: Historia Polski bez martyrologii (A Perfectly Ordinary Country: A History of Poland without Martyrology) (Wydawnictwo Filtry, 2021), which is a revised and expanded version of Poland and the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom (Wiley Blackwell, 2014). His earlier works include Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland (Oxford University Press, 2011), and When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in 19th Century Poland (Oxford University Press, 2000).

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

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 09 Sep 2022 16:47:52 -0400 2022-09-15T16:00:00-04:00 2022-09-15T18:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Brian Porter-Szücs
EIHS Symposium: Against History: Interpretation, Erasure, and the Politics of Method (September 16, 2022 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/95296 95296-21789132@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 16, 2022 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

"Against History” interrogates the following premise: History is a concept and set of practices whose ideological work is often rendered invisible or obscured by the assumption that its narratives and analyses offer an objective representation of the past. Our participants will draw on their innovative work in ancient history (Sara Forsdyke) and colonial or post-colonial studies (Joshua H. Cole, Deirdre de la Cruz) to consider some of the ways in which historical interpretations are fashioned and deployed as well as the erasures that are intentionally or unintentionally produced. How has history been used to buttress or challenge political and social orders? What methods might we use to restore a more complex, inclusive—and accurate—representation of the past?

Panel:
• Joshua H. Cole (Professor, History, University of Michigan)
• Deirdre de la Cruz (Associate Professor, History and Asian Languages & Cultures, University of Michigan)
• Sara Forsdyke (Professor of Classical Studies & Josiah Ober Collegiate Professor of Ancient History, University of Michigan)
• John Carson, moderator (Associate Professor, History, University of Michigan)

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

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 06 Sep 2022 07:35:46 -0400 2022-09-16T12:00:00-04:00 2022-09-16T14:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop / Seminar Old broken hammer closeup, Nenad Stojkovic (CC BY 2.0)
WCED Roundtable. Flashpoint: Brazil's Elections (October 4, 2022 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/98046 98046-21795516@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, October 4, 2022 11:30am
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies

On October 2, Brazilians go to the polls. This year’s presidential race is very tightly contested between the two front runners, incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro and former President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva.

One of the world’s largest democracies, Brazil has faced multiple recent challenges. This interdisciplinary roundtable brings together five scholars to analyze the election and its aftermath. Our expert speakers will address the historical relationship between political leaders and the military, recent legal and political responses to charges of corruption, the importance of race in national politics and policy, and the potential impact of this election on social welfare policies and Brazilian families.

Natasha Borges Sugiyama, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is a specialist on social policy, local governance, and the politics of poverty relief in Brazil. She is author of *Diffusion of Good Government: Social Sector Reforms in Brazil* (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013) and *Democracy at Work: Pathways to Well-Being in Brazil* (with Brian Wampler and Michael Touchton, Cambridge University Press, 2019). Her research on gender inclusion and well-being appears in *American Political Science Review, Global Social Policy, Latin American Politics and Society,* and the *Journal of Development Studies.*

A native of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Vânia Penha-Lopes is Professor of Sociology at Bloomfield College, co-chair of the Brazil Seminar at Columbia University, and a former member of the executive committee of the Brazilian Studies Association. She graduated from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (with honors) and from New York University (Ph.D., Sociology; M.A., Anthropology), and did post-doctoral work at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. She is the author of several books on race relations: *The Presidential Elections of Trump and Bolsonaro, Whiteness, and the Nation* (Lexington Books, 2022), *Confronting Affirmative Action in Brazil: University Quotas Students and the Quest for Racial Justice* (Lexington Books, 2017), and *Pioneiros: Cotistas na Universidade Brasileira* (2013).

Bryan Pitts is a historian of modern Brazil and assistant director of the Latin American Institute at UCLA. He is the author of the forthcoming monograph *Until the Storm Passes: Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil’s Military Dictatorship,* which will be published in January 2023 by University of California Press. He has also written about Brazilian politics in a variety of media outlets, with a particular focus on the role of the United States in laying the groundwork for Brazil’s 2016 parliamentary coup and the 2018 electoral victory of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro.

Fabio de Sa e Silva is Assistant Professor of International Studies and Wick Cary Professor of Brazilian Studies at the University of Oklahoma and an affiliated fellow of Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession. He currently studies what role law and legal institutions play in processes of democratic backsliding in Brazil and comparatively. Fabio co-directs the OU Center for Brazil Studies, is a member of the Executive Committee of the Brazilian Studies Association, and a Research Fellow at the Washington Brazil Office.

Edgar Franco-Vivanco is an assistant professor of political science at U-M. Edgar’s research agenda explores how colonial era institutions and contemporary criminal violence shape economic under-performance, particularly within Latin America. Edgar’s research on contemporary challenges to development focuses on criminal violence and policing. He is co-authoring a book that draws on extensive fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to study the differentiated effects of state interventions against organized criminal groups.

If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us at weisercenter@umich.edu. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 02 Sep 2022 17:01:25 -0400 2022-10-04T11:30:00-04:00 2022-10-04T13:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies Lecture / Discussion Flashpoint: Brazil's Elections
EIHS Lecture: Monuments Removed: Colonial-Era Statues in the Era of Decolonization (October 6, 2022 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/95287 95287-21789123@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, October 6, 2022 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

When India and Pakistan became independent, the urban landscape was marked by several hundred monumental statues to British military officials, viceroys, governors-general, and members of the royal family that had marked Britain’s colonial occupation. Sculpted by some of the most acclaimed British artists of the Royal Academy, the statues represented British public art as well as the empire’s public history. The removal of these statues in the 1950s and 1960s occasioned heated debates about the disruption of history, and in particular, a disruption of Britain’s history in South Asia.

Durba Ghosh is professor of history and affiliated with Asian Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell. She is the author of Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919-1947 (2017); Sex and the Family in Colonial India: the making of empire (2006) and with Dane Kennedy, the co-editor of Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (2006). This talk is part of a new project about colonial monuments and their afterlives in South Asia.

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

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 27 Sep 2022 09:58:03 -0400 2022-10-06T16:00:00-04:00 2022-10-06T18:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Durba Ghosh
EIHS Workshop: Disinheriting the Past, Democratizing the Present: Politics, Ethics, and the Art of Remembering (October 7, 2022 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/95297 95297-21789133@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 7, 2022 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Acts of public memorialization and commemoration are modes of historical narrativization that inform one’s sense of belonging to a political community. As current events from around the world remind us, questions about heritage, historical memory, and whom we choose to commemorate remain sites of open contestation. Depending on the discourse in which acts of remembrance are embedded, one person’s hero can be another’s villain, one person’s visionary another’s tyrant, one person’s revolutionary another’s terrorist. This EIHS graduate student workshop explores the relationship between history, heritage, and the ways in which a commitment to democratic values urge us to reconsider and re-curate public celebrations of the past. We consider the politics of heritage-making from a wide range of temporal and geographical settings.

Panelists:

• Christopher Blackmore (PhD Student, History, University of Michigan)
• Ayleen Paola Correa (PhD Student, Anthropology and History, University of Michigan)
• Kristin Foringer (PhD Student, Sociology, University of Michigan)
• Allison Grenda (PhD Student, History of Art, University of Michigan)
• David Tamayo, moderator (Assistant Professor, History, University of Michigan)


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

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Workshop / Seminar Thu, 22 Sep 2022 16:18:37 -0400 2022-10-07T12:00:00-04:00 2022-10-07T14:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop / Seminar Black Lives Matter Protest, Bristol, June 7, 2020 (Keir Gravil, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
STS Speaker. On Pandemic Potential (October 10, 2022 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/97566 97566-21794758@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, October 10, 2022 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Science, Technology & Society

In the aftermath of the West African Ebola crisis, the World Bank along with WHO, reinsurers, and a catastrophic risk modeling firm, developed the Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF). The aim of the PEF was to leverage private investment to rapidly finance pandemic emergency responses in poor countries. The construction and design of the PEF hinges upon a definition and formal mathematical rendering of what they’ve described as ‘pandemic potential.’ Pandemic potential—the idea that certain pathogens are more likely than others to cause mass sickness across national borders and over a short period of time -- signals a particular relationship between pathogens and public health scientists’ prophetic relation to the past.

While much has been written about temporal ideologies governing pandemic preparedness and discourse, less has been said about the categories of person/human and place/geographies that ‘pandemic potential’ also presumes and produces. In this conversation, I hope to discuss what all of this means in relation to race, finance capital, and geography, via a close reading of the bond’s documentation, interviews with key players in the development of the bond, and other critical analyses of the public health’s financialization.

Adia Benton is an associate professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Northwestern University, where she is affiliated with the Science in Human Culture Program. She is the author of the award-winning book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone, and is currently writing a book about the West African Ebola outbreak. More broadly, she studies the political, economic and historical factors shaping how care is provided in complex humanitarian emergencies and in longer-term development projects – like those for health.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, Office of Global Public Health, African Studies Center, Department of Anthropology

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 22 Sep 2022 09:09:09 -0400 2022-10-10T16:00:00-04:00 2022-10-10T17:30:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Science, Technology & Society Lecture / Discussion Prof. Adia Benton
EIHS Lecture: The Quetzal Crosses the Pacific: Bridging Asian and Latin American Studies (October 20, 2022 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/95288 95288-21789124@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, October 20, 2022 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

In 1579, a group of Franciscan Friars entered Ming China with the intention of establishing a Catholic mission in the country. They brought with them several objects of indigenous Mexican manufacture that proved fascinating to the Ming literati who interviewed them. As far as we know, this is the first time that people in China came into contact with the material culture of colonial Spanish America. To understand the incident, we must step out of the mutually exclusive siloes of Asian and colonial Latin American studies, and question the spatiotemporal assumptions that underpin much of Pacific studies. Yet the incident does not just require us to transgress institutionalized boundaries governing research: it also provokes questions about the usefulness of a past that is all too easily reduced to an antiquarian curiosity.

Ricardo Padrón is a professor in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on Hispanic literature and culture, and conducts research on the geopolitical imagination of the early modern Hispanic world, as expressed in cartography and literature. His work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He recently served as a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and currently serves on the governing board of the Renaissance Society of America.

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

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 31 Aug 2022 13:39:32 -0400 2022-10-20T16:00:00-04:00 2022-10-20T18:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Lecture / Discussion Ricardo Padrón
EIHS Workshop: Geographic Imaginaries: Mapping Space, People, and Historical Mentalities (October 21, 2022 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/95298 95298-21789134@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 21, 2022 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

Space is a category which is mapped, molded, and given meaning by social processes, political agendas, cosmological beliefs, and epistemological assumptions. Projects of mapping are manifestations of power and so can also become the site of resistance, negotiation, and contestation. Acts of defiance, negotiation, and incorporation effectively re-map the topography of human relations and recast the terms of inclusion and belonging. This EIHS workshop brings together graduate students working across time periods and geographic regions to discuss how space is historically and culturally framed, exploring what types of historical narratives are engendered or retrieved by examining cartographic sources and attempting to access geographic imaginaries of the past.

Panelists:
• Noah Cashian (PhD Student, Ancient History, University of Michigan)
• Ismael Pardo (PhD Student, History, University of Michigan)
• Lediona Shahollari (PhD Candidate, History, University of Michigan)
• Zoe Waldman (PhD Candidate, History, University of Michigan)
• Kenneth Mills, moderator (J. Frederick Hoffman Professor of History, University of Michigan)

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

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 10 Oct 2022 14:14:40 -0400 2022-10-21T12:00:00-04:00 2022-10-21T14:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop / Seminar Unknown Indigenous artist, “Teozacoalco, Oaxaca,” 1580 (Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin).
Comp Lit Colloquium (October 21, 2022 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/96264 96264-21792191@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 21, 2022 2:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Comparative Literature

Details available on the CL events calendar

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 20 Mar 2023 14:26:09 -0400 2022-10-21T14:00:00-04:00 2022-10-21T15:30:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Comparative Literature Lecture / Discussion Tisch Hall
STS Speaker. A'uwe Objects of Care: On the Affects and Afterlives of Science (October 24, 2022 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/97567 97567-21794759@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, October 24, 2022 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Science, Technology & Society

In July of 1962 a group of scientists arrived in the A’uwẽ (Xavante) aldeia of Wedezé to conduct exhaustive documentation of the Indigenous people who lived there. Among the data they created for their study in human genetics was a set of anthropometric photographs—arresting images of faces, posed at five different angles by a physical anthropologist. Over the ensuing decades, the images traveled from Brazil to Germany to the United States, accruing new scientific and social meanings as they were passed from one research group to another. As researchers used these images to correlate data and enable their repeated study of the community and their descendants, their A’uwẽ hosts developed strategies—including affective labor—to shape scientists’ work for their own political purposes. Facilitating the return of the digitized images between 2015 and 2019, I participated in this circulation and the beginning of an A’uwẽ project to reclaim these scientific materials. This talk traces the history of this research by posing the question of return: What does A’uwẽ repossession of these images teach us about how to manage and care for the products of mid-century race science? In their transit and use, the photographs tie together generations of researchers and the people they studied. They also mark the persistence and mutation of race and population science into the twenty-first century.

Rosanna Dent is a historian of the life and human sciences and an assistant professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on how human interactions unfold in the context of knowledge production, and the implications of these relationships for questions of political and social justice. From 2021-2022 she was a member of the School for Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and in 2022 she is a fellow of the ACLS. She holds a PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Office of Global Public Health, and the Department of Anthropology.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 22 Sep 2022 09:09:34 -0400 2022-10-24T16:00:00-04:00 2022-10-24T17:30:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Science, Technology & Society Lecture / Discussion A'uwe man with mid-century photo from his community.