2024-2025 Series
Tuesday, February 4, 2025 @ 5:00pm
Edith Bleich Lecture Series
Richter Library, Third Floor Conference Room
Sara McDougall, Professor, Global History; Coordinator, Medieval Studies, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the CUNY Graduate Center
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Confirming your attendance in advance enables sufficient set-up for the program. We look forward to seeing you there!
Please join the Center for the Humanities at the upcoming Edith Bleich Lecture Series featuring Professor Sara McDougall. Her current book is a microhistory that is part true crime, part medieval iteration of the timeless tale of a migrant woman from the countryside who struggles to survive in the big city, in this case Dijon towards the end of the Middle Ages. At that time, in the second half of the fifteenth century, in the midst of warfare, endemic disease, and political upheaval, Dijon's municipal authorities investigated all manner of crime and other wrongdoing. Women appeared in these investigations most often as victims or as witnesses, but also as accused of theft, violence, sex crimes, insults, and sorcery. McDougall’s presentation will draw upon these sources to make an investigation of another kind, one that asks what we can learn from these legal documents about this one woman’s life, but also about the interworkings of gender, religion, and justice in late medieval society.
Sara McDougall is Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and appointed to the faculty in Biography and Memoir, French, History, and Medieval Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She studies gender and justice in the Middle Ages, with a focus on women’s encounters with legal and religious ideas in the society and culture of Medieval France. The author of two books, Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late-Medieval Champagne (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), and Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, c.800-1230 (Oxford, 2017), she has also co-edited special issues for Law & History Review and Gender & History on historical responses, infanticide and on marriage in global history, on marriage trials for Medieval People, and a six-volume Global History of Crime and Punishment with Bloomsbury Press. Recent articles examine punishing women for having sex, infanticide prosecutions, consequences of extramarital pregnancy, illegitimacy and the priesthood, and adultery prosecution in medieval France, as well as other writings on the family, marriage, gender, and crime. She has also written on these and other topics for Slate, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.
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2023-2024 Series
Thursday, April 11, 2024 @ 4:00pm
Edith Bleich Speaker Series
Richter Library, Third Floor Conference Room
Jennifer Evans, Professor of History, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
The Center for the Humanities invites you to join us for the Edith Bleich Lecture with Jennifer Evans, Professor of History at Carleton University in Canada.
This lecture asks how the queer and trans past has often been drawn upon to make a series of claims about liberal democracy itself, including the place of identity in rights-based discourses of experience, policy, and governance. Drawing on lessons from German history, Evans argues that in celebrating decriminalization and the attainment of key social rights, we have forgotten that not everyone benefited equally from these gains, as in fact there were many different forms of solidarity and struggle over bodies, desire, community, politics, and family. Using kinship as an analytic category allows us to uncover that phenomenon, to seek out the fraught as well as productive ways in which Germans have confronted race, gender nonconformity, and sexuality in social movements, art, and everyday life. "Why We Need Queer Kinship Now More than Ever" tells the story of entanglements and alliances, desire over respectability, and good and bad kin, as queer and trans people have tested new possibilities for life, love, and public and family life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Jennifer V. Evans is Professor of History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She has written books and articles on the history of sexuality, photography, social media, and memory. Recent books include The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism with Duke University Press, an edited volume for Berghahn Books in celebration of the life and writing of Jean Quataert, and the co-written monograph Holocaust Memory and the Digital Mediascape, which just came out with Bloomsbury. Evans is currently overseeing a multi-platform big data project on the weaponization of history and hate in social media networks and she is in the early stages of a new book entitled How Photography Shaped the Sexual Revolution. Alongside her academic writing, she undertakes collaborative digital projects. She is co-curator of the New Fascism Syllabus and the German Studies Collaboratory.
to view a recording of this talk by Jennifer V. Evans!
2022-2023 Series
Nicholas Terpstra: "On the Move: Finding Young People in the Early Modern World," Kislak Center at the University of Miami
Monday, March 6, 2023 @ 7:00pm
Where do we find youths in the early modern world? Where did they find themselves? Often it was on the road or on the seas, in motion from home to some other place or places, and seldom entirely by choice. As we become more curious about global history and to seeing how early modern Europeans (ie., roughly 16th to 18th centuries) encountered the world and were shaped by it, we’re drawn to the intersections of this mobility with gender and with race. Much of what was new in early modern experience came first to and through young people, often as the involuntary agents of broader social and economic forces. In this lecture, I’ll focus first on a few individuals or groups of young people from different parts of the world who demonstrate some of these realities. I’ll then pull back and ask some broader questions about why it’s hard to capture and understand the experience of young people at that time, and also why looking more closely at these youths might reshape our understanding of the early modern period more generally.
Prof. Nicholas Terpstra is an historian of Renaissance and early modern social history, exploring questions at the intersection of politics, religion, gender, and charity, above all those that deal with marginalized individuals and groups. He has written on the politics of poor relief (Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy [Harvard: 2013]), the exploitation of young women in Renaissance Florence and the efforts to cover it up (Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence [Johns Hopkins: 2010]), early modern cross-cultural religious encounters and the experiences of religious refugees (Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation [Cambridge: 2015]), and how religious reform, colonialism, and early capitalism intersected (Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures [Routledge: 2020/2021].
