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 (2019-2020)

    Marisa J. Fuentes
    “Refuse Bodies, Disposable Lives: A History of the Human and the Transatlantic Slave Trade”

    November 19, 2019

    4pm
    Olin Sang 207

    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

    Dr. Fuentes' talk will consider the precarious lives and lingering deaths of what European slave traders called, “refuse” slaves— African captives who were refused at purchase or who survived the Middle Passage but died before they could be sold in Atlantic ports. This topic arose during her confrontation with an archive that mentioned or referred to—in abstract—hundreds of thousands of people who died in the process of the slave trade but who are taken for granted in the historical and theoretical accounts of slavery, theories of precarity, and the human liminality. Fuentes wants to dwell on these people and bodies because the production of “the raw material of slaves” as laborers and property, also rendered humans as “waste”—the collateral damage of the capitalist regime of early modern slavery. This is a new project in which Dr. Fuentes is contemplating the conditions of “refuse slaves” in the archive and the consequences of this category of human to our understanding of capitalism, slavery, histories and theories of the human, and the origins of black disposability.

    Past Events

    "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.
    From Dissertation to Published Book

    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.

    “One People without Borders': The Lost Roots of the Immigrants' Rights Movement, 1954-Present”

    January 17, 2019

    Speaker: Eladio Bobadilla, PhD Candidate, Duke University  
    “Mourning in America: Ronald Reagan and the Crisis of the Black Professional”

    January 15, 2019

    Speaker: Leah Wright Rigueur, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government 

    "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

    Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Panel Discussion: "Translating the Grenada and Iranian Revolutionary Experiences into Theory"

    November 29, 2017

    A discussion with Brian Meeks (Brown University) and Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
    Discussants: Greg Childs, Naghmeh Sohrabi, and Manijeh Moradian 

    Co-sponsored by the Mandel Center for the Humanities and the History Department

    "The Declaration of Dependence: Central America and Re-Centering Early American Diplomatic History"

    October 26, 2017

    Ray Ginger Lecture
    Speaker: Jessica Lepler, Associate Professor of History, University of New Hampshire

    Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Kickoff: "Are Some Revolutions More Important Than Others?"

    September 11, 2017

    Greg Childs and Naghmeh Sohrabi presiding; David Scott (Columbia), Bernard Yack (Brandeis), Vivian Solana Moreno (Brandeis) presenting

    Co-sponsored by the Mandel Center for the Humanities and the History Department

    "Building the Decentralized State: The United States and Colombia from Developmentalism to Neoliberalism"

    April 20, 2017

    Amy C. Offner, Assistant Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

    Hadassah-Brandeis Institute presents "Women as Agents of Change? Fresh Perspectives on Gender & Religion"

    March 29, 2017

    Featuring:

    • Natalie Cornett on nineteenth-century Polish women's activists

    • April French on evangelical women in Soviet Siberia

    • Geraldine Gudefin on female Jewish immigrants to France and the US in the early 20th century

    • Michelle Mann on Algerian Muslim women (19th & 20th centuries)

    "The King of Islandia: How Segregation and its Violence Made a Man and a Nation Rich"

    March 2, 2017

    Nathan D. B. Connolly, Johns Hopkins University
    [Co-sponsored by AAAS and the offices of the Provost and the Dean of Arts and Sciences] Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

    “Market Marronage: Women Runaways and the Informal Economy in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World”

    February 6, 2017

    Shauna Sweeney, NEH-OI Postdoctoral Fellow, College of William and Mary