Philosopher and law professor Martha C. Nussbaum will deliver the 2017 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, which is the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. Her lecture topic will draw from her latest book project, which brings a philosophical view to political crises in America, Europe, and India by offering a deeper understanding of how fear, anger, disgust, and envy interact to create a divisiveness that threatens democracies. Nussbaum is the University of Chicago’s Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics. This event is sold out, but a wait list is available. There […]

Historians know that over the course of the American Civil War, the Confederacy essentially starved to death, a result of the Union blockade, the breakdown of slavery on the home front, and not enough food being grown. What we don’t know, however, is what that felt like for ordinary people on the most intimate and individual scale. This lecture will explore the ways that the war affected what people ate and how food choices became symbols of nationalism, resistance, and survival. This project looks at food and hunger from the perspectives of white Southern civilians, African Americans, and Confederate soldiers. […]

Frank Bösch of the Center for Contemporary History (ZZF) will present a talk for the German Historical Institute’s spring 2017 lecture series, “The Making of the Digital World.” He is professor of European History of the Twentieth Century at the University of Potsdam. Please RSVP through Eventbrite. Refreshments will be served from 6 to 6:30 p.m.

Blanche Wiesen Cook will discuss her third and final volume of Eleanor Roosevelt (2016), which focuses on the war years and after—from 1939 to 1962. Cook is Distinguished Professor of History and Women's Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

As a young woman of 35, Sidney Robertson proposed, organized, and directed a California Work Projects Administration project designed to survey musical traditions from a wide range of English-speaking and immigrant communities in Northern California. The result of her efforts generated a remarkable multi-format ethnographic field collection (with recordings, photographs, sketches and drawings of the musical instruments, and field notes)—the WPA California Folk Music Project (1938–40)—that captured a unique cross-section of the music that people of many backgrounds were performing at the time. Catherine Hiebert Kerst is a folklife specialist/archivist in the American Folklife Center. She received her PhD from George […]

Youk Chhang is the executive director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), founder of Sleuk Rith Institute (a memorial dedicated to the survivors of the genocide), and a survivor of the Khmer Rouge's "killing fields." Born and raised in Phnom Penh, from the age of 15 he suffered years of torture and imprisonment under the Khmer Rouge. Chhang has written extensively and produced films on the crimes and victims of the Khmer Rouge. He is the senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Genocide, Conflict Resolution, and Human Rights at Rutgers University, Newark.

Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker Philipp Artus will discuss his experimental animations, light installations, and drawings that explore the manifestations of life through movement, sound, and imagery. Artus composes audiovisual experiences that unite playful elements with minimalist structures, timeless themes with contemporary observations, and turbulent acceleration with contemplative silence. Free and open to the public (includes admission to permanent collection). Reservations recommended.

New York–based critic and curator Bob Nickas presents a selection of 100 paintings, one chosen for each year from 1915 to 2015. With some perverse choices and more than a few glaring omissions, Nickas has selected works in a personal, spontaneous, and intuitive way, engaging with the idea of art history as a game of cadavre exquis, to be played by one person who is always, in a sense, of two minds. Beginning with Russian Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich and Dada conceptualist Marcel Duchamp, Nickas suggests that painting is, and perhaps has always been, an assisted readymade.

Guy Laron will discuss his latest book, The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East (Yale University Press, 2017), which investigates the causes and consequences of one of the most significant moments in the Arab-Israeli conflict as well as the Cold War in the Middle East. On the war's fiftieth anniversary, Guy Laron refutes the widely accepted belief that the war was merely the result of regional friction, revealing the crucial roles played by American and Soviet policies in the face of an encroaching global economic crisis, and restoring Syria's often overlooked centrality to events leading up to the hostilities. […]

Cathy Jean Maloney will discuss her book World's Fair Gardens: Shaping American Landscapes and Garden History (University of Virginia Press, 2012), which describes how nine World’s Fair landscapes forever changed America’s major urban green spaces and private backyards. From Frederick Law Olmsted’s work at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair to a “dream team” of landscape artists at the 1940 New York World’s Fair, Maloney will show how these trends filtered into home gardens and growers’ hothouses.

Taking the case of Arabic, English, and French from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, this lecture traces the rise of modern comparative literature to a new global regime in which a language acquired power in the world (empire) insofar as it held the power to capture the world “exactly” (empiricism). In the shadow of imperialism and empiricism, languages that once had styled themselves “incomparable”—larger than life—now were urged to simulate life: the really seen and heard. This turn from “artificial” to “natural” literary languages newly bound word to world, making “incomparable” languages comparable. Languages now had to […]

The Jesuits were arguably the first corporate group in history to think and to act globally. In the early modern era Jesuits functioned as pioneer globalizers, making substantial contributions to the growth of connectivity and global consciousness around the world. This lecture will examine the external and internal opportunity structures which made it possible for a Catholic missionary and teaching order such as the Society of Jesus to play such a prominent role as cultural brokers between East and West and North and South in the first phase of globalization. Their global “way of proceeding,” however, became so controversial that […]