Fall 2021 - Gail Hershatter
Stubborn Silences: Writing the History of Chinese Women
Gail Hershatter, Distinguished Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz
Time: 5 PM EDT
Date: Monday, October 18th, 2021
Location: Virtual via Zoom
Registration: Open to all, please register here: https://cglink.me/2ee/r1273717
Scholars of women and gender in China have often liked to make the claim that adding a serious consideration of women to our understanding of Chinese history would not be like adding a spice, as in "add women and stir," but rather it would alter the field fundamentally. Have we delivered, collectively, on that claim? And what was it we most wanted our students to learn that could help them to think about the world of the past and the world they inhabit?
Fall 2020 - Deborah Coen
Deborah Coen will be speaking about her research for her book Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale. Here is a link to her book: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo24768042.html and this is its description:
“Today, predicting the impact of human activities on the earth’s climate hinges on tracking interactions among phenomena of radically different dimensions, from the molecular to the planetary. Climate in Motion shows that this multiscalar, multicausal framework emerged well before computers and satellites. Extending the history of modern climate science back into the nineteenth century, Deborah R. Coen uncovers its roots in the politics of empire-building in central and eastern Europe. She argues that essential elements of the modern understanding of climate arose as a means of thinking across scales in a state—the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, a patchwork of medieval kingdoms and modern laws—where such thinking was a political imperative. Led by Julius Hann in Vienna, Habsburg scientists were the first to investigate precisely how local winds and storms might be related to the general circulation of the earth’s atmosphere as a whole. Linking Habsburg climatology to the political and artistic experiments of late imperial Austria, Coen grounds the seemingly esoteric science of the atmosphere in the everyday experiences of an earlier era of globalization. Climate in Motion presents the history of modern climate science as a history of “scaling”—that is, the embodied work of moving between different frameworks for measuring the world. In this way, it offers a critical historical perspective on the concepts of scale that structure thinking about the climate crisis today and the range of possibilities for responding to it.”
Fall 2019 - Kristen Weld
"Uncovering Dangerous Pasts: A Dispatch from the Trenches of Public History"
Professor Kirsten Weld (Harvard University)
Thursday, October 24th, 142 Goldwin Smith Hall, at 5:00-6:30pm
Fall 2019 - Andrew Lipman
"Squanto's Odyssey: Atlantic Slaveries and the Mayflower Myth"
Professor Andrew Lipman (Barnard College/Columbia University)
Monday, November 18th, in 132 Goldwin Smith Hall, at 5:00-6:30pm
Spring 2019 - Valerie Kivelson
"Erotic Magic in 17th-Century Russia: The Art of Witchcraft"
Dr. Valerie Kivelson
Fall 2018 - Robert Self
"The Unhappiest Place on Earth: The Family Economy in the American Century"
By Professor Robert Self (History, Brown University)
Fall 2017 - Nathan Connolly
"What's Yours Is Mine: Family and Property in an Age of Land Grabbing"
Professor Nathan Connolly (Johns Hopkins University)
Podcast: https://vod.video.cornell.edu/media/20171026_Lewis+Aud/1_okslt8o6
Spring 2017 - Matthew Karp
The Inaugural "Making History Accessible" Lecture
"Slave Power: How Southern Slaveholders Mastered U.S. Foreign Policy"
Matthew Karp (Assistant Professor of History Princeton University)