Book Talk with Martin Nesvig: "Promiscuous Power: An Unorthodox History of New Spain"

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Book Talk with Herns Marcellin and Toni Cela: "Les jeunes Haïtiens dans les Amériques/ Haitian Youth in the Americas"

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Stanford Lecture: "The Library of Saint Thomas Becket"

Christopher de Hamel is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University. He has doctorates from both Oxford and Cambridge, as well as several honorary doctorates. He is a Fellow of the prestigious Society of Antiquaries of London and a member of the Roxburghe Club. For 25 years from 1975 he was responsible for all catalogues and sales of medieval manuscripts at Sotheby's worldwide, and from 2000 to 2016 he was librarian of the Parker Library in Cambridge, one of the finest small collections of medieval books in the world. In 2009, he delivered the Lyell Lectures at Oxford University. He has written many books, including A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, now the standard work on the subject. His most recent book is Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (2016), which won the Wolfson History Prize for history written for the general public and the Duff Cooper Prize for best work of history, biography, or political science. Learn more.

Book Talk with Scott Heerman: "The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country, 1730-1865"

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Stanford Lecture: "Edward Long and the Making of 'Race' Across the Black/White Atlantic"

Catherine Hall's research focuses on re-thinking the relation between Britain and its empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is particularly interested in the ways in which empire impacted upon metropolitan life, how the empire was lived "at home," and how English identities, both masculine and feminine, were constituted in relation to the multiple "others" of the empire. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867 (2002) looks at the process of mutual constitution, both of colonizer and colonized, in England and Jamaica in the period between the 1830s and the 1860s. Catherine's recent book, Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (2012), focuses on the significance of the Macaulays, father and son, in defining the parameters of nation and empire in the early nineteenth century.  Read More. 

Book Talk with Tim Watson: "Culture Writing: Literature and Anthropology in the Midcentury Atlantic World"

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Edith Bleich Speaker Series: "The Secret Diary of Constantijn Huygens, Jr. (1628-1697): Society, Politics, and Culture in the Late Seventeenth Century"

‌Rudolf Dekker taught history at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (1981-2010) and now directs a research group on autobiographical writing and history at the Huizinga Institute - Research School for Cultural History at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Family, Culture and Society in the Diary of Constantijn Huygens, Jr. (2013); Child of the Enlightenment, Revolutionary Europe Reflected in a Boyhood Diary (2009), with Arianne Baggerman; Humour in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age (2001); and The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (1989), with Lotte van de Pol.  Learn more.

Stanford Lecture: "Imagination and the Self"

François Recanati is a Research Fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. In addition, he is a "directeur d’études" at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), and the Director of a research lab in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science hosted by Ecole Normale Supérieure. His numerous publications in the philosophy of language and mind include Meaning and Force(1987), Direct Reference: From Language to Thought (1993), Oratio Obliqua, Oratio Recta (2000), Literal Meaning (2004), Perspectival Thought (2007), Philosophie du langage (et de l’esprit) (2008), Truth-Conditional Pragmatics (2010) and Mental Files (2012). He is a co-founder and past President of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy, and was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. In 2014 he was awarded the CNRS Silver Medal and was made a honorary doctor of the University of Stockholm.  Read more. 

Book Talk with Viviana Diaz-Balsera: "Guardians of Idolatry: Gods, Demons, and Priests in Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón’s Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions"

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