Robert P. Goldman is the author of several key works in the fields of Sanskrit literature and Indian thought, and has recently completed the translation of the Ramayana of Valmiki. The recipient of several honors, including election as fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Goldman currently serves as editor of “South Asia Across the Disciplines,” a monograph series published jointly by the presses of Columbia University, University of Chicago, and the University of California. Goldman will also…

In August 1870 the Prussians and their German allies laid siege to the French city of Strasbourg and bombed the city center, killing and wounding civilian men, women and children. The siege gave rise to the first instance of wartime international humanitarian aid to civilians. This talk examines the experience of that aid from the perspective of the recipients as well as the ethical debates over the city's continued resistance in the face of overwhelming force. Rachel Chrastil joined the…

Stories – narratives of the past – are necessary in all collectivities that seek to constitute and maintain themselves.  In modern times, competitive states have sought to mobilize all resources and bio-power in their territory by adopting singular, linear histories of the state, nation and civilization.  But, ironically, just as these singular stories were becoming dominant, the world was globalizing more actively than ever.  The stories themselves have come to be shaped by global forces. While the historical enterprise of…

In Republican Rome, birds had served as the messengers of the gods, communicating in ways that only a few religious specialists could fully understand and interpret. At the turn of the first century CE, these same birds began to speak plain Latin, apparently endorsing the new regime of the Caesars in language that anyone could understand. On closer examination, however, these talking birds turn out to be transmitting a much more troubling message about the constitution of the Roman body…

Please join the History Department for this scholarly talk by Manu Bhagavan of Hunter College: Toward universal relief and rehabilitation: India, UNRRA, and the new “India” had been involved in the United Nations even in its wartime incarnation, inasmuch as the Crown Government of the colonized region brought the territory into the Second World War and, in turn, voted to support various institutions created to deal with the challenges wrought by the conflict. Among the most prominent of these was…

Ernesto Chávez, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas, El Paso, and Visiting Researcher at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, reads expressions of devout Catholicism and queer codes in the early- and mid-twentieth-century letters of silent screen actor, Ramón Novarro, and arts philanthropist Noël Sullivan. This free, public lecture takes place Tuesday, April 21, 2015, at 2:00pm in Humanities 1, Room 520. In this presentation, Ernesto Chávez offers preliminary thoughts on materials pertaining to Ramón Novarro, the…

David Brundage is Professor of history and the History Graduate Program Director. The talk will draw on an essay-in-progress for a collection entitled Remembering 1916: The Easter Rising, the Somme and the Politics of Memory, ed. Richard S. Grayson and Fearghal McGarry. Brundage focuses his attention on a period that has been relatively neglected in the history of the Irish in America, the 1920s through the early 1960s. How (and by whom) was the 1916 Rising remembered in this period?…

The History Department Presents the Thom Gentle Lecture on Environmental History Bernadette Jeanne Pérez Ph.D. Candidate University of Minnesota, Twin Cities What can the sugar beet industry tell us about the relationship between agricultural science, capitalism, and American settler colonialism? In this talk, Pérez draws upon turn of the twentieth century beet sugar manuals, which drew upon ideas of heredity and evolution, and mid-twentieth century industry histories, which narrated industry founders as heroic pioneers, to reveal that efforts to breed…

During the Second World War, 50,000 to 100,000 French women chose to leave France to work for the war industry in Germany. Their transnational experience points to the racial and gendered division of labor that deployed itself throughout Nazi occupied Europe. In an attempt to sustain the war effort while limiting German’s women’s draft and preserve their status as mothers and housewives, the National-socialist state chose to rely on the forced labor of millions of foreign men and women from…

Covell Meyskens, Assistant Professor of History at the Naval Postgraduate School, will talk about his website Everyday Life in Mao's China which currently houses over 5,000 images China. Meyskens will discuss the website's origins, its intended and unintended contributions to the expanding field of PRC history, and suggestions for offer suggestions on how to conduct comparable digital projects on other research topics. Covell Meyskens is a historian of twentieth century China with a particular interest in industrialization, revolution, and everyday…

Area studies is often simplistically depicted as little more than a Cold War form of knowledge, but its emergence as a component of the postwar American academic scene was in fact propelled and shaped by visions, exigencies and contingencies that were not initially or exclusively about the needs of the national security state. Zachary Lockman’s 2016 book Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States draws on extensive archival research to offer a different perspective on the origins and trajectory of area studies…

In recent years, there has been a nostalgic resurgence of interest in the Jewish deli menu. Restaurateurs and purveyors of Jewish food are deliberately making American Jewish food fit for the twenty-first century, emphasizing sustainability, local produce, and a nostalgic longing for family and communal histories. By selling and consuming a revitalized deli cuisine, American Jews express their longing for authentic Jewish pasts, build community in the present, and pass on their values to future generations.     Prof. Rachel B. Gross…