Mitch Snyder (1943–1990) was a radical advocate for the rights of homeless people and leader of the Community for Creative Non-Violence in Washington, DC. Much is known about his advocacy and radical political protests, but less is known about the profound transformation that Snyder experienced while in prison when he met the radical Catholic priests (and brothers) Philip and Daniel Berrigan. Leah Richardson—public services, research, and instruction librarian at George Washington University's Gelman Library—will focus on Snyder's experience and early acts of radical resistance that took place while he was an inmate at the Danbury Federal Correctional facility. The information […]

Laura Sjoberg, associate professor of political science at the University of Florida, will present a talk at the Mortara Center for International Studies. Sjoberg's recent publications include Gendering Global Conflict: Toward a Feminist Theory of War (Columbia University Press, 2013). Remapping IR is an occasional series of talks on alternative perspectives to power, states, and the international system. These events are jointly sponsored by the Government Department and the Mortara Center for International Studies at Georgetown University.

German composer Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) was deeply affected by the devastating experience of World War I in European society. He came of age during the war and translated his reflections into poignant musical compositions that address many of the themes that pervade all types of global conflict, including death and loss of innocence. The Library of Congress Music Division holds several Hindemith manuscripts, as well as archival documents that relate to his career. Nicholas Brown has served as a music specialist/concert producer for the Music Division since spring 2012. Register for free tickets here. Presented in association with the Library […]

André Brock is assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan. Brock is one of the preeminent scholars of Black cyberculture. His work bridges science and technology studies and critical discourse analysis, showing how the communicative affordances of online media align with those of Black communication practices. He recently completed a sabbatical as a visiting researcher with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England and is working on a manuscript on Black online technoculture.

Kira Thurman is assistant professor of history and Germanic languages and literatures at the University of Michigan. A classically trained pianist who grew up in Vienna, Austria, she earned her PhD in history from the University of Rochester in 2013 with a minor field in musicology through the Eastman School of Music. Her research, which has appeared in German Studies Review, Journal of World History, Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS), and Opera Quarterly, focuses on two separate topics that occasionally converge: the relationship between music and national identity in European history, and Europe's historical and contemporary relationship with the black […]

In her forthcoming book, Chasing Empty: An American History of Loving and Loathing Our Material Things, Arielle Bernstein argues that today’s minimalist trend has been co-opted into just the latest consumer trend, one that sells products meant to replace old things with new ones, rather than simply scale back. While Marie Kondo and many other online minimalist gurus earnestly urge consumers to change their attitude towards material things, the advent of new minimalist products, from tiny houses, to minimalist shoes, to minimalist toothbrushes, has transformed minimalism into yet another consumable product. Bernstein is a writer, professor, and cultural critic who has taught at […]

Contemporary artist Matt Mullican will deliver the Elson Lecture at the National Gallery of Art. Born in Santa Monica in 1951, Mullican attended the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s, then rose to prominence as part of the "Pictures Generation." Mullican’s ordered, symmetrical early works, part schematic, part cosmological chart, belie an enormously ambitious artistic aim: to contain and make sense of the universe. More recently he has used his subconscious as material. During public performances while under hypnosis, Mullican has created drawings that he then assembles on bed sheets in large grids. Limned in the artist’s elongated, […]

For this talk, Erica Edwards will analyze how contemporary African American expressive culture has refracted the culture of US empire throughout the long war on terror, from 1968 to the present. Mapping the transformations of African American literature against campaigns of counterterrorism throughout the late Cold War and post-Cold War period, she argues that Black women writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Danielle Evans, and Nikky Finney exposed the imperial grammars of blackness while also marking out minor grammars of subsistence, survival, and black radical undoing. Edwards is associate professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She specializes in African […]

Anthony Ryan Hatch will deliver the 8th annual William Form Lecture sponsored by the University of Maryland's Department of Sociology. His current project focuses on the uses and meanings of psychotropic drugs in institutionalized mental health care settings in the United States. This project, tentatively titled "Silent Cells: Psychotropics and Institutionalized Life," investigates how psychotropic drugs function as technologies of biosocial control in an era of mass incarceration. Hatch is assistant professor of science in society at Wesleyan University. His new book is Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

Michael Leja will deliver this year's George Levitine Lecture at the 47th annual session of the Middle Atlantic Symposium in the History of Art co-sponsored by the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. Leja is professor of the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania. His work is interdisciplinary and strives to understand visual artifacts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, primarily in the United States, in relation to contemporary cultural, social, political, and intellectual developments. His publications include Looking Askance: Skepticism and American […]

How do the funding, setting, architecture, and exhibition of a presidential library shape our understanding of the president’s character? And how do diverse performances of the presidency create radically different opportunities for the practice of American citizenship? In Presidential Libraries as Performance: Curating American Character from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), Jodi Kanter examines the nation's 13 extant presidential libraries as performances that encourage visitors to think in particular ways about executive leadership and about their own roles in public life. Kanter is associate professor of theatre at George Washington University. This program is part […]

Very few conservation battles have endured longer or with more violence than on the North Coast of California, behind what locals call the Redwood Curtain. Darren Speece's new book, Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Politics (University of Washington Press, 2016), explores the long history of the Redwood Wars, focusing on the ways rural Americans fought for control over both North Coast society and its forests. The Redwood Wars pitted workers and environmental activists against the rising tide of globalization and industrial logging in a complex war over endangered species, sustainable forestry, and the fate of the […]

Yaakov Ariel is professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on Christian-Jewish relations in the modern era, and on Christian attitudes towards the Holy Land, Zionism, and Israel. Ariel has also explored Jewish and Christian reactions to modernity and post-modernity, as well as the effect of the counterculture on Jewish and Christian groups. He has published dozens of articles and a number of books on these topics. His book Evangelizing the Chosen People: Missions to the Jews (2000) won the Outler Prize of the American Society of Church History. His latest book, […]

Gershom Scholem founded the academic study of Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism. Central to his project was the identification of Kabbalah as "mysticism." This, however, is a weighty presupposition and is by no means to be taken for granted. This lecture by Menachem Lorberbaum will explore the construction of "mysticism" as an episteme in early twentieth-century philosophy and will analyze both its power and its price as an analytic prism for understanding Kabbalah. Lorberbaum is Ellie and Herbert D. Katz Distinguished Fellow and Erika A. Strauss Teaching Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, and Professor […]

Susan Robbins Watson, archivist and manager for historical programs and collections at the American Red Cross, and Tom Goehner, curator of education, discuss the phenomenon of Red Cross wartime knitting and its impact on knitting today. During World War I and again during World War II, the American Red Cross launched nationwide, volunteer-driven knitting campaigns to supply soldiers and war refugees with warm clothing. These volunteer knitters belonged to a Red Cross unit called the Production Corps. Production Corps volunteers produced knitted items compatible with military uniforms (navy blue and olive) as well as items suitable for convalescing soldiers. These […]

Library of Congress Jazz Scholar (2016–17) Ingrid Monson will discuss the intersections between Miles Davis and John Coltrane, addressing issues of listening, identification, gender, and ethics. Monson is Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music at Harvard University and interim Dean of Arts and Humanities at Harvard University. She is the author of Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (2007) and Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (1996). Her article “Hearing, Seeing, and Perceptual Agency” (Critical Inquiry, 2008) explores the implications of work on cognition and perception for poststructural theoretical issues in the humanities. Tickets are free and are […]

Andrew Sabl is Orrick Fellow and Visiting Professor (2013–20) in the Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University. He is the author of Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics (2002) and Hume’s Politics: Coordination and Crisis in the "History of England" (2015), both from Princeton University Press, as well as numerous scholarly articles. He is currently finishing a project, tentatively titled "The Uses of Hypocrisy: An Essay on Toleration," on the subject of this talk.

Arthur Eckstein discusses his new book, Bad Moon Rising (Yale University Press, 2017), which details how the Weather Underground began to engage in serious, ideologically driven, nationally coordinated political violence and how the FBI attempted to monitor, block, and capture its members—and failed. Eckstein shows that the FBI ordered its informants inside Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to support the faction that became Weather during the tumultuous June 1969 SDS convention, helping to destroy the organization; and that the FBI first underestimated Weather’s seriousness, then overestimated its effectiveness, and how Weather outwitted them. Eckstein further reveals how an obsessed and […]

In this lecture, Anouar Majid expands Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism and extends it back to the Late Middle Ages, when the Andalusian order, characterized by a fragile coexistence among members of different religions, was upended by a crusading Christian spirit and the rise of a Western hegemonic worldview that allowed no room for alternatives. Such a world system forced Muslims and other non-Western traditions into a defensive mode, fighting back by deploying indigenous traditions. Even as European powers pursued their expansionist agenda in the name of freedom, Muslims fought for their independence by rallying their people against Western imperialism. […]

From colonial discourses of black magic to the underlying rhythms of son jarocho, blackness in Mexico has been excised from the national imaginary. Despite the recent interim poll conducted in 2015, in which 1.38 million Mexicans identified as Afro-descendant, in concert with the burgeoning scholarly attention unearthing the black presence in Mexico, Afro-Mexicans are not considered relevant despite their continued presence since the Spanish Invasion. Blackness has at best been exceptionalized as a product of Caribbean migration, or at worst, criminalized and summarily disappeared. This presentation will trace the importance of Afro-Mexicans in Mexican history through a look at their representation […]

American foreign policy is very much a part of the struggle for power at home. Henry Kissinger and the foreign policy of realism or realpolitik should be understood less in terms of its international dimensions, and more as a response to public opinion and an effort to influence American domestic partisan politics. Richard Nixon sought to create a “New Majority,” and Kissinger played a key role in that effort. The electoral landslide of 1972 was a result of these efforts, which also led to Kissinger’s increasing prominence as the first diplomatic celebrity and superstar. Nixon did not fully grasp the […]

Jennifer Fitzgerald is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. A specialist in comparative political behavior, much of Fitzgerald's work examines the ways in which social context shapes political attitudes and vote choice in advanced democratic societies. She recently completed a book manuscript titled Localism and Voting Radical Right in Europe. The book develops and tests a localist model of radical right support that roots individuals within their communities. Fitzgerald recently began a new collaboration with researchers at Örebro University in Örebro, Sweden, to understand the political behavior of young Swedes. Her publications include the book […]

Quantifying color has always been slippery business. How have people interested in the subject come up with a common language—and common colors—so that people can talk comparatively and accurately about colors? In a world without universally accepted color terminology or standards, dictionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries laid essential groundwork for modern color systems such as the Pantone system. This talk will discuss the ways that color dictionaries and descriptive charts gave naturalists and many others a language that was both visual and textual for identifying with much greater precision just what a color was, and what a […]

Kathryn Hemmann will discuss the graphic novels of a four-women artistic collective called CLAMP as well as Sailor Moon animation to demonstrate how writers are capable of applying a female gaze to the themes of their work. She will argue that the male gaze should not be taken for granted in the study of popular culture, as an awareness of an active female gaze can change the ways in which we understand consumer-oriented narrative media and fannish transformative works in a global context. Hemmann is assistant professor of Japanese in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at George Mason […]

Lihi Ben Shitrit will discuss her book Righteous Transgressions: Women’s Activism on the Israeli and Palestinian Religious Right (Princeton University Press, 2015). She examines the roles women in conservative religious movements play in expanding the demographics of political activism by analyzing the four most influential political movements of the Palestinian and Israeli religious right: the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, the ultra-Orthodox Shas, the Islamic Movement in Israel, and the Palestinian Hamas. Ben Shitrit demonstrates that women's prioritization of a nationalist agenda over a proselytizing one shapes their activist involvement. Ben Shitrit is assistant professor at the School of Public and International Affairs at the […]

Diana Kormos-Buchwald will deliver the Lyne Starling Trimble Science Heritage Public Lecture on "Einstein in California." Albert Einstein’s connection to the scientists and astronomers at Caltech dates back much longer than his three sojourns as a visiting scientist in the years 1931 to 1933. His early exchange of letters with George E. Hale in 1913 about gravitational deviation of light and the solar magnetic effect were to preoccupy Einstein for several decades to come and were to constitute one of the main topics of discussion when he visited Pasadena almost twenty years later. Kormos-Buchwald is professor of history at Caltech […]

Kaiser Kuo is host of the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. He recently repatriated to the United States after 20 years in Beijing, where he worked as Director of International Communications for Baidu. He was previously a technology reporter in China. Kaiser was guitarist and co-founder of the band Chunqiu (Spring & Autumn), and was a founder of China’s first heavy metal band, Tang Dynasty. He is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and holds an MA from the University of Arizona. This event is part of the Asia In Depth Series at […]

In the recent US presidential campaign, the public discourse on "fake" news and intelligence reports regularly made reference to the 2002–03 reporting on the Iraqi biological weapons threat as an example of the failure of the state and media to properly assess risk. Yet the current transformations in both the media ecology and the form of the security state are intensifying the racialization of crisis thinking that enabled the Iraq invasion in the first place. Detailing the public health, literary, and journalistic constructions of the Iraqi smallpox threat prior to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, Neel Ahuja outlines how […]

Nathan Ensmenger, associate professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, will give a talk for the German Historical Institute's spring lecture series, The Making of the Digital World. Ensmenger's research focuses on the social and cultural history of software and software workers, the history of artificial intelligence, and questions of gender and identity in computer programming. His 2010 book, The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise, explored the rise to power of the "computer expert" in American corporate, economic, and political life. He is currently working on a book exploring the global environmental […]

Alexander Nemerov, department chair and Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University, will give the 66th annual A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, entitled The Forest: America in the 1830s. The preeminent lecture series will be held at the National Gallery of Art on March 26, April 2, 9, 23, 30, and May 7, 2017, at 2:00 p.m. In his six-part series, Nemerov will explore the Hudson River School painters and their contemporaries, focusing on what their art did and did not show of the teeming world around them. The forest serves […]

Jeffrey Herf presents his book Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967–1989 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), which examines a spectrum of antagonism by the East German government and West German radical leftist organizations, ranging from hostile propaganda and diplomacy to military support for Israel's Arab armed adversaries, from 1967 to the end of the Cold War in 1989. Herf provides new insights into the West German radicals who collaborated in "actions" with Palestinian terrorist groups, and confirms that East Germany, along with others in the Soviet Bloc, had a much greater impact on the […]

Architect and Bauhaus Dessau director Hannes Meyer (1889–1954) lived and worked in Switzerland, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Mexico. His career was shaped by political persecution, resistance, and efforts to construct more egalitarian and just societies. This presentation argues that Meyer’s itinerary illustrates especially clearly architecture’s poetic relationship with space and time, a relationship defined more by disjuncture and interruption than coherency and continuity. Ryan Long is the current Vambery Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland.

Architect and Bauhaus Dessau director Hannes Meyer (1889–1954) lived and worked in Switzerland, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Mexico. His career was shaped by political persecution, resistance, and efforts to construct more egalitarian and just societies. This presentation argues that Meyer’s itinerary illustrates especially clearly architecture’s poetic relationship with space and time, a relationship defined more by disjuncture and interruption than coherency and continuity. Ryan Long is the current Vambery Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland.

In post-revolutionary Iran, women are legally “second class” citizens, with lesser rights than men in situations of family law (inheritance, custody, divorce, age of marriage) and public participation (restrictions on political office, public service, and legal testimony). But other evidence (ethnographic, demographic, and cinematic) indicates an increasingly empowered female population, and reminds us to look beyond surface impressions to understand the politics of daily life in the contemporary Islamic Republic of Iran. Through this lens, the lecture will attempt to ask and answer the question: How do we evaluate actual social and political conditions under less representative political systems, when […]