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 […]

In his classic 1972 Artforum essay, critic Lawrence Alloway described the art world as a network. Taking cues from Alloway’s observation about the nature of art production in the '60s and '70s, John A. Tyson proposes that the era’s portfolios of printed multiples can be understood as networked coproductions. In this lecture, Tyson historically contextualizes a selection of collective projects from the National Gallery of Art’s holdings: Walasse Ting’s “1-Cent Life” (1964), the Wadsworth Athenaeum’s “X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters)” (1964), curated by Samuel Wagstaff Jr.; gallerist Leo Castelli’s multimedia “Ten from Leo Castelli” (1968), William Copley’s […]

Since 1992, award-winning cartoonist and illustrator Barry Blitt has done illustrations and drawn over 80 covers for the New Yorker, including "Deluged," which was voted Cover of the Year by the American Society of Magazine Editors in 2006, and "The Politics of Fear," a finalist for the same award in 2009. His work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, Time, Rolling Stone, and the Atlantic. From 2003 to 2011, he illustrated Frank Rich's weekly column in the New York Times. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Visual Arts and Homewood Arts Programs at Johns Hopkins University.

Born in 1942 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Beatriz Sarlo is one of Latin America’s most important cultural critics. Having studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires, Sarlo founded the journal Punto de Vista with a group of progressive intellectuals during the military regime. She has published studies on Argentina’s literary greats including Sarmiento, Borges, and Cortázar. In her departure from traditional literary criticism to a broader definition of culture, Sarlo has combined her formal training in literature with a more inclusive definition of cultural production to include other popular expressions in both Argentinian culture and beyond to address cultural […]

Thelma Golden will deliver the 16th annual David C. Driskell Distinguished Lecture in the Visual Arts at the University of Maryland. Golden has served as director and chief curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem since 2005 and was a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1988 to 1998. Golden is an active guest curator, writer, lecturer, juror, and advisor. This lecture will coincide with the James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art, organized by Howard University, scheduled for April 7–9, 2017. The Colloquium’s theme this year is “Interventions, Ruptures, and Affirmations: Archival Engagements in African […]

William Ferris is the Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History at UNC–Chapel Hill and an adjunct professor in the Curriculum in Folklore. He is associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South, and is widely recognized as a leader in Southern studies, African American music, and folklore. He is the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Ferris has written and edited 10 books and created 15 documentary films, most of which deal with African American music and other folklore representing the Mississippi Delta. He co-edited the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (UNC Press, 1989), which […]

Elizabeth Petrick, assistant professor of history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, will give a talk for the German Historical Institute’s spring lecture series, The Making of the Digital World. Petrick's research focuses on the history of information technologies, civil rights, public policy, and the relationship between development and use of technology. Her book Making Computers Accessible: Disability Rights and Digital Technology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) explored the efforts of activist groups, computer companies, and legislators to promote access to computer technologies for people with disabilities. She is currently beginning a project on the intellectual history of computer interfaces, specifically on research starting in the […]

Alexander Nemerov, chair of Stanford University's Department of Art and Art History and the Carl and Marilynn Thomas Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, recounts the stories of two artists, Grandma Moses and Shirley Jackson—one the painter of nostalgic American scenes and the other the writer of the infamous short story, The Lottery (1948). Despite living within miles of each other in Bennington, Vermont, and gaining popularity about the same time in the 1950s, these women presented vastly different views of America. Live webcast will be available here.

At a moment when public media is facing the threat of elimination from lawmakers, this presentation examines the organizational contributions made by noncommercial media research to US informational history. Taking an institutional approach, this presentation looks at the infrastructural origins of public media in archival distribution practices after WWII. Josh Shepperd is assistant professor of media and communication at the Catholic University of America. He serves as national director of the Library of Congress’s Radio Preservation Task Force, a digital humanities consortium of 150 professors and 400 archives, and is convener of the Public Media Research Project, a collaboration with […]

Nancy Rosenblum will discuss her recent book, Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America (Princeton University Press, 2016), which explores how encounters among neighbors create a democracy of everyday life that has been with us since the beginning of American history and is expressed in settler, immigrant, and suburban narratives and in novels, poetry, and popular culture. Rosenblum is the Harvard University Senator Joseph Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government emerita.

Orlando Patterson will deliver the third annual National Italian American Foundation Pellegri Distinguished Lecture at the University of Maryland. Patterson is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His academic interests include the culture and practices of freedom; the comparative study of slavery and ethno-racial relations; and the cultural sociology of poverty and underdevelopment with special reference to Caribbean and African American youth. The lecture will be followed by a reception.

The biblical passage in the title—quoted by a famous school library leader in a 1979 article—expresses school librarianship's decades-old frustration at being positioned between the education and library professions and having its obvious contributions frequently overlooked and undervalued by both. During his tenure at the Kluge Center, Wayne Wiegand has been researching his current book project—a history of the American public-school library. The project incorporates five perspectives: the history of public-school education; the history of American librarianship; the social history of reading (including the history of print culture); the history of childhood; and the history of cultural institutions as places. […]

This talk will explore how southern black women artfully navigated the US pension bureaucracy to gain recognition as Union widows. Based on extensive research of black soldiers’ wives and widows at the National Archives, Brandi Brimmer will reconstruct the pension application process and evidentiary obstacles newly freed black women faced in their attempt to claim and maintain their position on the pension roster. Over the course of the presentation, she will demonstrate how these women utilized the US pension bureaucracy to air their grievances and remake widowhood on their own terms. Brimmer is assistant professor of history and geography at Morgan […]

The National Churchill Library and Center welcomes Matthew Dallek for a discussion of his book Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security, which was awarded the 2017 Henry Adams Prize from the Society for History in the Federal Government. Dallek traces the birth of homeland security to an epic battle during World War II: Eleanor Roosevelt’s vision of a wartime New Deal was pitted against New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s campaign to militarize millions of civilians to keep Americans safe from air raids, chemical and biological attacks, spies, and even land invasion. Dallek argues that Americans […]

J. P. Singh is Chair of Culture and Political Economy and Director of the Centre for Cultural Relations at the University of Edinburgh. Singh has authored five monographs, edited three books, and published dozens of scholarly articles. He is editor of the journal Arts and International Affairs and also Stanford's book series on Emerging Frontiers in the Global Economy. In policy work, Singh has advised international organizations such as UNESCO, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. Remapping IR is an occasional series of talks on alternative perspectives to power, states, and the international system. These events are jointly […]

This presentation will examine histories of Latin American immigration, migration, and deportation in the United States. It locates the structural and institutional roots of today’s Mexican and Central American migration to the United States in a number of historical global processes. Aviva Chomsky will explain how the cross-border movement of people emerged in the context of late twentieth century globalization as well as through a much longer global history of colonialism, displacement, and removal of indigenous peoples in both North and South America. The role of social, economic, and political forces driving these processes, such as nation-state building, economic development, […]

Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and NYU's first Distinguished Global Leader-in-Residence, will address the current state of globalization and its future in a lecture at NYU Washington, DC. Brown served as British Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party from 2007 to 2010. He served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1997 to 2007, making him the longest-serving Chancellor in modern history. Brown's time as Chancellor was marked by major reform of Britain's monetary and fiscal policy and sustained investment in health, education, and overseas aid. As Prime Minister, his tenure coincided with the recent […]

Kevin Driscoll is assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. His research explores popular culture, political communication, and networked personal computing, with special attention to mythology, folklore, and infrastructure. Some of his previous work explores everyday and emerging uses of social media such as live-tweeting, joking about politics, and spreading rumors. His dissertation traced the pre-history of social media through the dial-up bulletin board systems of the 1980s and 1990s. Currently, he is writing a technical and cultural history of the French Minitel system in collaboration with Julien Mailland from Indiana University. Please RSVP here. Refreshments will be served from 6 […]

Are we deranged? Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. Ghosh is an acclaimed author whose novels include the Ibis Trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire), The Glass Palace, and The Shadow Lines. The Great Derangement is his first major work of nonfiction since In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale. The Washington History Seminar is a joint venture of the National History […]

The National Churchill Library and Center welcomes David Owen (Lord Owen) for a discussion of his new book, Cabinet's Finest Hour: The Hidden Agenda of May 1940. With keen insight, gained in part from having sat at the Cabinet table himself, Lord Owen examines the tense Cabinet meetings that followed Winston Churchill's appointment as Prime Minister, as he and his colleagues debated whether to negotiate with Hitler. Lord Owen served as British Foreign Secretary from 1977 to 1979 and was a co-founder of the Social Democratic Party. From 1992 to 1995, he was an EU peace negotiator in the former Yugoslavia, and now sits in the House of Lords. A […]

Biologist E. O. Wilson popularized the concept of biophilia, which he described as "the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms." To what extent can cities be biophilic and provide basic conditions for urban citizens to live a life in close contact with nature? University of Virginia Professor Timothy Beatley will address this question, exploring some of the ways that cities are integrating nature into their planning and fostering connections to the natural world. Beatley will discuss the Biophilic Cities Project at the University of Virginia and the global Biophilic Cities Network, which aims to extend and […]

Steven Zipperstein, the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University, will deliver the 2017 Fleischman Lecture. His talk will examine the reverberations of the infamous 1903 pogrom in Kishinev (Chisinau), the current capital of Moldova and then part of the Tsarist Empire, in modern Jewish history.