A popular image persists of Albert Einstein as a loner, someone who avoided the hustle and bustle of everyday life in favor of quiet contemplation. Yet Einstein was deeply engaged with politics throughout his life; indeed, he was so active politically that the FBI kept him under surveillance for decades. His most enduring scientific legacy, the general theory of relativity – physicists’ reigning explanation of gravity and the basis for nearly all our thinking about the cosmos – has likewise…

Quinones will discuss the origins of our nationwide opioid epidemic: pharmaceutical marketing, changes in our heroin market, and new attitudes toward pain among American healthcare consumers. He will also discuss cultural shifts that made this epidemic possible. Sam Quinones is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist and author of three books of narrative nonfiction. His book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic won a National Book Critics Circle award for the Best Nonfiction Book of 2015. He has reported on immigration, gangs, drug…

Prof. Johanna Hanink (Brown University), “Modern Citizenship Tests and Classical Funeral Orations.”

1968 Poster1968 was a pivotal year in U.S. and global history. In the United States, students protested the Vietnam War. In France, they protested university conditions and sparked worker strikes across the country. In Mexico City, they protested state violence. This was also the year when the peaceful protest known as the “Prague Spring” flourished in Czechoslovakia, when Martin Luther King planned a Poor People’s March on Washington, and when Robert Kennedy ran for president. But the backlash against all…

Postures of Refusal: From Antigone to Kaepernick How do the postures of our bodies communicate citizens’ dissidence or conformity, non-compliance or care? When Kaepernick kneels, Black Lives Matter lie down in the streets, soldiers stand at attention, and we all speak of moral fortitude as having a spine or showing spine, are these mere dramatizations and harmless metaphors? Or might they tell us something about the gendering of moral conscience? This talk will look at the significance of posture of…

2019 marks the 50th anniversary of NASA’s Apollo program. The mission’s crewed flights began in 1968 with the first lunar circumnavigation; on July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong became the first human to step foot on another planet. By the end of 1972 Apollo’s funding was cut and NASA’s moon explorations were over. From 1969 to 1972 there were eight crewed missions and 12 astronauts walked on the surface of the moon, exploring and doing scientific work “for the benefit of…

DeVun Flier This lecture examines how certain ancient and medieval thinkers claimed that “hermaphroditism” was the original condition of humanity, created by God and documented in the first chapters of Genesis. The idea that Adam was a hermaphrodite fueled medieval debates about sex and gender, as well as about human nature. In the modern world, objections to transgender and gender-nonconforming people often cite the bible, which is viewed as describing the division of humans into two distinct sexes. Historians and…

Almost from the moment it occurred, the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota was cast in the popular imagination as a point of no return, at which not only did hundreds of Lakota men, women and children perish but so, in a sense, did Native American life itself. Now David Treuer–the critically acclaimed writer, anthropologist, and journalist, himself Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota–brings to that mythology its long-overdue reckoning.…

The Medieval Studies Program and the Department of History are proud to sponsor a colloquium on the work and pedagogy of Sharon Farmer. The event will include presentations by six of her students exploring Professor Farmer’s areas of expertise. The event will take place on February 16th in the McCune Conference Room, and the schedule will be as follows: 1:00-2:30 I. Gender Nicole Archambeau (Colorado State University). “Granting Access: Revealing Women’s Networks through Miraculous Healing.” Abigail P. Dowling (Mercer University).…

Please join us for a lecture by Juan Carlos Estenssoro, entitled “The inescapable Indian: Yungas, chunchos and serranos in the geographical, social and pictorial imaginings of Peru, 16th through 18th centuries.” Juan Carlos Estenssoro is an historian and professor of Iberian and Latin American Studies at l’Université Paris, where he also directs the Center for Research on Colonial Spanish America (CRAEC). ** The lecture will be delivered in Spanish with consecutive English translation from 4:00 to 5:30 pm.  After a…

Paul Thomas Chamberlin recounts the brutal conflicts that killed millions on battlegrounds across the postcolonial world. He proposes a new geography and periodization and explores the lasting political impact of mass violence after 1945.

McCarthy 2Seventy years ago this February, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin launched his destructive anticommunist rampage. Addressing the Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, WVA, McCarthy charged that 205—or was it 57?—known communists were working for the U.S. State Department, enjoying the protection of an indifferent or even a disloyal Truman administration. McCarthy went on to even wilder charges, intensifying an anticommunist Red Scare that had begun shortly after the end of World War II. For a few years in…