“Negotiating Narratives.”

A Lecture Series for 2011-2012 sponsored by the History Department

Wednesday, April 18th @ 6:00 p.m. in Greene Hall 145. Open to the Public.

“The Empire of Hope: Emotion, Agency, and the Politics of Japanese Reconstruction after 3/11″ by David Leheny, Henry Wendt, III ’55 Professor of East Asian Studies, Princeton University

The tsunami and nuclear meltdown that devastated Japan’s northeastern coast did not begin the debates about Japanese decline. Those have a longer vintage, emanating most prominently from the end of the bubble economy in the early 1990s, ushering in two decades of low economic growth and doubt about the country’s future, as well as neoliberal economic reforms and sometimes striking neo-nationalist turns in politics. In this milieu, a team of distinguished social scientists began a research project on the “social sciences of hope,” investigating how young people in smaller communities might rebuild employment markets and create new opportunities for themselves and others. The March 11th disaster had special implications for this project, and several of its contributors became key players in subsequent policy debates about how hope could be rebuilt in post-tsunami Japan. This presentation provides an overview of the social and political debates in Japan surrounding the disaster, focusing especially on how discourses of hope — an almost determinedly apolitical, emotional concept in these debates — became part of a contested terrain in which national and local forces imagined the responsibility to rebuild as well as who the beneficiaries of Japanese reconstruction would be.

 

April 2 @ 6:00 p.m. in ZSR 404.  Open to the Public.

“Leaving New Orleans:  A Personal Urban History,” by Leslie Harris, Associate Professor of History and the Winship Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Emory University.  Professor Harris’s primary research areas are urban history, African-American history, and the history of women and gender.  She is the author of In the Shadow of Slavery:  African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which was awarded the Wesley-Logal Prize by the American Historical Association.  She co-edited with Iran Berlin Slavery in New York(New Press, 2005). Professor Harris’s public scholarship engages New Orleans’ history on academic, personal, and public levels; she is the principal investigator for the New Orleans After Katrina project, a digital initiative that allows students, scholars, and the general public to contribute to and critically engage with the history of New Orleans.  For more information on the project, please seethe link at http://nolaresearch.org/   In addition to a description of the New Orleans After Katrina project, Professor Leslie Harris will discuss her recent manuscript, titled “Leaving New Orleans: A Personal Urban History,” in which she points out that many aspects of New Orleans history have been obscured by the responses to Hurricane Katrina. Professor Harris seeks to answer important scholarly and personal questions about historians’ roles and responsibilities (to themselves, their families, familiar places, and history) that will be of interest to history students and faculty alike.

February 27 @ 6:00 p.m. in DeTamble Auditorium.  Open to the Public.

“Then and Now:  Civil War memory in the Civil Rights Era and in the Obama Era,” by David W. Blight, Professor of History at Yale University and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition.

Professor David Blight, award-winning author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, now examines the Civil War’s centennial celebration to determine how Americans made sense of the suffering, loss, and liberation a century earlier. He shows how four of America’s most incisive writers—Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin—explored the gulf between remembrance and reality. Now on the eve of the 150th anniversary of the war, we have an invaluable perspective on how this conflict continues to shape the country’s political debates, national identity, and sense of purpose.

February 2 @ 5:00 in DeTamble Auditorium.  Open to the Public.

“The American University of Beirut: Student Activism and the Arab Spring,” by Professor Betty S. Anderson of Boston University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations.  Her lecture will deal with university students who joined the Arab Spring protestors.  While analysts have listed historical antecedents to the current events, such as the 1919 Revolution in Egypt, little mention has been made of the Arab students movements that erupted in the 1950s and 1960s. The conditions giving rise to those movements differ from those of today, but the excitement engendered by youth empowerment resonates quite vividly across the generations. Just as with today’s youth, their predecessors demanded that they be considered valid actors on the political stage. In the case of the earlier generation, the arena on which they chose to focus was, first and foremost, the university campus, but they also articulated demands that called for change at the political level throughout their countries and the region at large. A study of student activism at the American University of Beirut (AUB) highlights the issues most important to the earlier generations of student activists

 

November 14 @ 6:00 p.m. in ZSR Library Room 404

“Rethinking the Image of China and Japan in Global History” by Benjamin Elman

Benjamin Elman is Professor of East Asian Studies and History at Princeton University. Professor Elman will contribute a thought-provoking lecture on the ideological uses (and abuses) of historical narratives and the historian’s role in perpetuating or challenging stories held dear to national identities. He is the author of several books in the fields of Chinese intellectual and cultural history and the history of science, including From Philosophy to Philology: Social and Intellectual Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Harvard Press, 1984), Classicism, Politics, & Kinship: The Ch’ang-chou New Text School of Confucianism in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, 1990), and On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900 (Harvard, 2005).  In 2008 Professor Elman co-authored a world history textbook: World Together, Worlds Apart, Vol. 1 [Vol. A-B].

September 12 @ 12:00 in De Tamble Auditorium

Dr. Omar Ali, Associate Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina @ Greensboro, will deliver his talk entitled “The Swahili Coast as Part of the Indian Ocean African Diaspora.”  Professor Ali’s presentation will focus on the diasporic journeys of African men, women and children from the interior of the continent to the Swahili Coast, and on to places as distant as southern Iran, western India, and Sri Lanka.  He explores the conditions that led these Africans far from their homes and discusses the ways in which captives of war, mercenary soldiers, merchants, sailors, musicians, and concubines from the Swahil coast and interior regions of Africa shaped the cultures and histories of the wider Indian Ocean world

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September 14 @ 6:00 in DeTamble Auditorium

Dr. Jonathan Berkey, Professor of Middle East History at Davidson College, will deliver his talk entitled “Muslim Pasts and Islamic Futures:  Narrative, History and the Future of Islam.”  Professor Berkey’s research and writing focus on Islamic religious culture and medieval Egypt and Syria.  He is the author of The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo (1992); Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near East (2001); and The Formation of Islam:  Religion and Society in the Near East, 600-1800 (2003).  His talk is open to the general public.