Events

Students participate in Professor Govind Sreenivasan's course, "Early Modern History," reenacted a late 16th century infantry drill.

Students in Professor Govind Sreenivasan's course, "Early Modern History," reenacted a late 16th century infantry drill.

History Department Events and Speaker Series (2023-2024)

photo of Dr. Elisabeth Leake
"Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan"

November 14, 2023

4:30 - 6 PM EST
Olin Sang 207

Elisabeth Leake, the Lee E. Dirks Professor in Diplomatic History and Associate Professor of History at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, researches the global histories of decolonization and the Cold War. Her second book, the subject of this talk, "Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan," was published by Oxford University Press in 2022 and won the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations' Robert H. Ferrell Prize in 2023. This is a new global history of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, 1979–89, interweaving local, regional, and international histories of the civil war of the 1980s. 

photo of Karen Tani
"Costed Out: Disabled Citizens and American Governance in the Late Twentieth Century"

April 17, 2023

4:40-6 PM
Pearlman Lounge 113
Registration is required to receive a Zoom link

Karen Tani (L '07, PhD '11), the Seaman Family University Professor, University of Pennsylvania, is a scholar of U.S. legal history, social welfare law, administrative agencies, and the role of rights in the modern American state. She is the author of States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935-1972 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), which won the 2017 Cromwell Book Prize from the American Society for Legal History.

 

Past Events

“Genealogy’s Past and Early America’s Future: Why Research Matters, History’s Information Ecosystem is Expanding, and We Can Compete in the Mad, Bad World Online”

November 8, 2022

Speaker: Karin Wulf, Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian,
John Carter Brown Library

"Is It Not Dust?: A Baroque History of Postwar Germany"

September 19, 2022

Speaker: Alice M. Goff, Assistant Professor of German History and the College, University of Chicago

"Ottoman Migrants and the Many Paths to Statelessness"

November 18, 2021

Chris Gratien, Assistant Professor of History at University of Virginia, specializes in the history of the Ottoman Empire and is a producer of the Ottoman history podcast. His monograph entitled The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier will by published this Spring by Stanford University Press.
“New Approaches to the History of the US in the World”

March 11, 2021

Speaker: Robert McGreevey, Professor of History, The College of New Jersey

"Disease, Power, and Medicine in Postindependence Cuba: Historical Lessons for the COVID Era"

November 19, 2020

Speaker: Daniel A. Rodriguez, The Manning Assistant Professor of History, Brown University

America's Racial Reckoning: Black Lives and Black Futures in Historical, Political and Legal Context

June 12, 2020

Virtual Panel Discussion: Chad Williams, the Samuel J. and Augusta Spector Chair in History and the Chair of the African and African American Studies department (Moderator)
Anita Hill, University Professor
Daniel Kryder, the Louis Stulberg Chair in Law and Politics
Leah Wright Rigueur, the Harry Truman Associate Professor of History

America is in the midst of reckoning with the legacies of racism, racial violence, and systemic injustice against black people. The current national uprising, sparked by the recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, have exposed the complex intersections of history, politics, and the law in how race, white supremacy, and anti-blackness function in American society. Join us for a conversation with leading Brandeis faculty about these issues and how we can chart a new future for black lives.

"Refuse Bodies, Disposable Lives: A History of the Human and Transatlantic Slave Trade"

November 19, 2019

Speaker: Marisa J. Fuentes, Rutgers University
Associate Professor of Women's & Gender Studies and History; and Presidential Term Chair in African American History, 2017-2022

"Letters of Power Across the Indian Ocean"

September 26, 2019

Speaker: Nurfadzilah Yahaya, Assistant Professor, History Department at National University of Singapore

“China’s War on Smuggling: Illicit Coastal Trade in Historical Perspective”

March 28, 2019

Speaker: Philip Thai, Assistant Professor of History, Northeastern University
"Jack Davis: The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea"

March 19, 2019

Jack Davis, PhD '94, will speak at Brandeis about his Pulitzer-Prize-winning history of America's gulf coast: The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea.

March 6, 2019

A Conversation with Kate Wahl, Editor-in-Chief of Stanford University Press

Moderated by Naghmeh Sohrabi, Associate Director for Research at the Crown Center and the Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor of Middle East History at Brandeis.
"Cold War Landscapes: Stories from the Edges of the American Military Empire"

February 5, 2019

Speaker: Gretchen Heefner, Associate Professor of History, Northeastern University
“Atlantic Gyre: Old Regime Cultures and the American Revolution”

January 31, 2019

Speaker: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Associate Professor of History and Spatial Studies, University of Southern California
“Violent Passions: New Perspectives on Early America”

January 29, 2019

Speaker: Sarah Pearsall, Senior Lecturer, Cambridge University.

"Thinking about Gradual Emancipation"

November 15, 2018

History Department Speaker Series
Speaker: Hendrik Hartog, Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty; Professor of History, Princeton University

"Arab Existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre, and Decolonization"

October 25, 2018

History Department Speaker Series
Speaker: Yoav Di-Capua, Associate Professor of History, Univeristy of Texas, Austin

"Now the Old Empire has Flopped: Youth Culture, Gobalization, and the Decolonization of the English Cup of Tea"

March 20, 2018

Speaker: Erika Rappaport, Professor of History, Univeristy of California, Santa Barbara

"The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and why it matters today"

January 24, 2018

Speaker: Heather Ann Thompson, Professor of History, University of Michigan