Seminar Leaders

Greg Childs is an Assistant Professor in the History Department, an affiliated faculty member of the African and African American Studies Department, and a member of the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at Brandeis. His work focuses on questions of resistance and revolution and African Diaspora history in Brazil and the Caribbean. More specifically, he is interested in how people of African descent have historically produced intellectual and theoretical programs in the midst of or in the aftermath of revolution. To this end, his current projects include a book on the relationship between the emergence of a critical public sphere and armed resistance to racism in late colonial Brazil, as well as a manuscript in progress on race and the rise of mental institutions in the aftermath of three revolutionary moments: the US Civil War, the 1844 La Escalera Rebellion in Cuba, and the 1898 Canudos Rebellion of Brazil. He has most recently published “Spectral and Secret: Torture and Secrecy in Archives of Slave Conspiracies,” in Social Text and “Thinking about Grenada Through Iran,” with the “African American Intellectual History Society,” an organization of which he is a founding member.

Naghmeh Sohrabi is the Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor of Middle East History and the Associate Director for Research at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies. In 2013-14 she participated in the Mellon Sawyer seminar, “Rethinking the Age of Revolution,” at Brandeis University led by Profs. Jane Kamensky and Sue Lanser. During that year she became familiar with the recent debates and scholarship on the American, French, and Haitian revolutions and as a scholar of the Iranian Revolution, began thinking of some of the themes raised in “Forgotten Dreams and Misplaced Revolutions.” In 2014-2015, through a Mellon “New Directions” fellowship, she began training in anthropology and conducting ethnographic research for her second book tentatively titled The Inner Lives of the Iranian Revolution. By combining historical and anthropological research methods, her book aims to answer the question: How was revolution “experienced” by people in its midst in the lead up to its moment of victory? She has published “Muddling Through the Iranian Revolution” in Perspectives on History and “Books as Revolutionary Objects” on “Age of Revolutions: A HistorioBLOG.” She is also the author of Taken for Wonder: Nineteenth Century Travel Accounts from Iran to Europe (Oxford University Press, 2012).