Mandel Center for the Humanities

February 2, 2026

4pm in the Mandel Atrium 

In this talk, Muna Güvenç draws on her latest book, The City is Ours, to explore how urban space can both constrain and empower the lives of marginalized communities. Trained as an architect and architectural historian, she reflects on a methodological shift from understanding architecture as a top-down instrument of nationalist control to analyzing space-making as a lived, collective, and political practice from below.

Based on 28 months of fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2023, Güvenç shares insights from ethnography, participant observation, over 150 interviews, and longitudinal spatial analysis to trace how pro-Kurdish municipalities in Turkey mobilized urban governance and planning to resist state coercion. Introducing the concept of “wiggle room,” Güvenç shows how urban spaces can create openings for resilience, solidarity, and political mobilization under conditions of repression, revealing the transformative power of place-making in contexts of violence and exclusion.

February 26, 2026

A conversation with Prof. Emilie Connolly (Brandeis History) and Prof. Megan A Black (MIT) 

4pm in Mandel 303

From the earliest days of its founding, the United States set its sights on Native territory. Amid better-known “Indian wars,” the federal government quietly built an empire by treaty, offering payments to Native peoples for their land. Routinely inadequate, these payments were nonetheless pivotal because federal officials chose not to deliver them as a lump sum. Instead, the government kept the bulk of payments owed to Native nations under its own control as a trustee, and made access to future installments contingent on Native compliance. In Vested Interests, Emilie Connolly describes how a system of “fiduciary colonialism” seized a continent from its original inhabitants—and, ironically, furnished Native peoples with financial resources that sustained their nations.

Connolly documents two centuries of dispossession in the guise of fiduciary benevolence. Acting as both dispossessor and trustee, the federal government invested Native wealth in state bonds that financed banks, canals, and other infrastructural projects that enabled the country to expand further westward. Meanwhile, Native peoples protected the money they did receive for future generations, investing it in their own institutions and mounting legal challenges to hold their trustees accountable. Still, federal trusteeship placed tight constraints on Native economies with the aim of containing Native power, forcing nations to endure through sheer resilience and ingenuity. By chronicling the long history of Native land dispossession through financial paternalism, Vested Interests reveals the unequal dividends of colonialism in the United States.

Megan A Black:  Professor Megan A Black is a historian of U.S. environmental management and foreign relations in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power, which analyzes the surprising role of the U.S. Department of the Interior in pursuing minerals around the world—in Indigenous lands, formal territories, foreign nations, the oceans, and outer space. This work garnered four prizes in different subfields, including the George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society of Environmental History, Stuart L. Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, W. Turrentine-Jackson Prize from the Western History Association, and the British Association of American Studies Prize. 

Emilie Connolly: Professor Emilie Connolly is a historian of the 19th-century United States, with a focus on the history of political economy, colonialism, and the Indigenous peoples of North America. At Brandeis, I teach courses on early America, Indigenous History, and the history of American capitalism.

March 2, 2026

2:30 - 3:50 in Mandel 303

This talk explores emancipatory aesthetic experiments in Indian cinema foregrounding various regional and linguistic film industries beyond the Bollywood (Hindi language film industry based in Bombay) centric approach. I will analyze how the contemporary aesthetic experiments through form, content, and stylistics challenge the caste-gender reductive representations in Indian cinema. Through this, I examine how cinema interrogates the systems of dehumanization and offers affective archives of social justice that exceed the narrative. These aesthetic experimentations not only take inspiration from the vernacular indigenous resources but also from the global resistance against entrenched oppressive systems. Thus, I discuss the possibilities of Global Humanities that engage with multiple languages, social identities and technologies through cinematic interventions that are particular at the same time universal. 

April 21, 2026

2:15 - 3:20pm in Mandel 303