Roser Salicrú i Lluch  

Medievalist and Senior Researcher in Medieval Studies, Institució Milà i Fontanals of the Spanish National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) in Barcelona

"How did Christians and Muslims communicate in the Medieval Mediterranean? An Approach from the Crown of Aragon" 

Thursday, April 21 @ 7:00 pm | Recording here.  

Prof. Roser Salicrú is Senior Researcher in Medieval Studies at the Institució Milà i Fontanals of the Spanish National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) in Barcelona. She received her PhD from the University of Barcelona in 1996, and is the author of several books on the relationships between Christianity and Islam across the Mediterranean, the history of maritime communications, slavery, and travel in the Middle Ages. Prof. Salicrú will offer a course entitled “Christianity and Islam in the Late Middle Ages: Human Contacts beyond Diplomacy, Trade and Captivity in the Western Mediterranean." 

Newman Alumni Center is located off San Amaro Drive, across the street from the baseball stadium. There will be parking available behind the building, as well as Pay-by-Phone parking for vehicles without a UM Parking Permit.

Kyle Harper

 Professor of Classics and Letters and Provost Emeritus

The University of Oklahoma

"Health and History in a Time of Pandemic"

Thursday, February 11, 2021 at 7:00pm

"Kyle Harper has emerged as without doubt one of the most creative, engaging, and productive scholars currently working in the field of late antiquity. In two major publications (Slavery in the Late Roman World [2011] and From Shame to Sin [2013]) and through a series of punctiliously researched articles, he has added depth and color to our understanding of late antique social history, and of the differences Christianity did (and did not) make.."—The American Historical Review

Kyle Harper is Professor of Classics and Letters and Provost Emeritus at The University of Oklahoma. Dr. Harper is a historian of the ancient world whose work has spanned economic, environmental, and social history.  He is the author of three books  Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425  (2011), which was awarded the James Henry Breasted Prize by the American Historical Association and the Outstanding Publication Award from the Classical Association of the Middle West and South; From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality (2013), which won the Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in Historical Studies from the American Academy of Religion; and The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (2013), which has been translated into twelve languages. He is currently writing a global history of infectious disease.

Jennifer Morgan

 Professor of History and Chair of Department of Social and Cultural Analysis

New York University, New York

"Madwomen on the Slave Ship: Reproduction and Racial Capitalism"

Thursday, February 13, 2020 at 7:00pm

"[Morgan] has made a major contribution . . . by looking specifically at the issue of gender as a lens through which better to understand the establishment of race-based slavery in Britain's colonies in the Caribbean and North America."—The Historian

Jennifer Morgan is Professor of History in the department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University where she also serves as Chair.  She is the author of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and the co-editor of Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in America (University of Illinois Press, 2016).  Her research examines the intersections of gender and race in in the Black Atlantic world.

Her most recent journal articles include “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” in Small Axe; “Accounting for ‘The Most Excruciating Torment’: Trans-Atlantic Passages” in History of the Present, and “Archives and Histories of Racial Capitalism” in Social Text.  In addition to her archival work as a historian, Morgan has published a range of essays on race, gender, and the process of “doing history,” most notably “Experiencing Black Feminism” in Deborah Gray White’s edited volume, Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (2007).

She is currently at work on a project that considers colonial numeracy, racism and the rise of the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in the seventeenth-century English Atlantic world forthcoming with Duke University Press, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. 

Edith Bleich Speaker Series 2019

Rudolf Dekker

Autobiographical Writing and History Research Group Director
Huizinga Institute - Research School for Cultural History at the University of Amsterdam

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

Thursday, February 21, 2018 at 7:00pm

Kislak Center
Otto G. Richter Library, 1300 Memorial Drive, Coral Gables, Florida 33146

Free & Open to the Public‌  |  Registration Required

REGISTER

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Constantijn Huygens, Jr., an active participant in the literary, artistic, and scientific endeavors of his day, kept a secret diary during most of his life, from his youthful Grand Tour to France and Italy through his service as secretary to William of Orange. Until recently, historians have shied away from making use of this diary, because of its detailed discussion of the sexual mores of the Dutch and English elites. In fact, his diary offers a wealth of information about society and culture in the late Dutch Golden Age and the early Enlightenment, including family life, the Dutch and English royal courts, art and book collecting, warfare, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which brought William and Mary to the English throne. Even more importantly, the diary offers insight into the emergence of a modern conception of time, the development of diary writing, and the birth of a sociological view of society.

 “Dekker has had a keen eye for popular culture and eyewitness accounts of history throughout his career. Having published on, among other things, popular risings, cross-dressing, humor, childhood, and education in the early modern period, Dekker now presents us with an introduction to an extraordinary and extensive seventeenth-century diary, written by Constantijn Huygens...” 

— Willemijn Ruberg, Biography

‌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.

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Professor of History, University of Notre Dame
Professor, University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, Rome

Two Renaissance Magnates: Agostino Chigi and Jakob Fugger

When Martin Luther posted his 95 theses in 1517, a pair of merchant bankers controlled a surprisingly large segment of the European economy: Jakob Fugger in Augsburg and Agostino Chigi in Rome. Exact contemporaries (Fugger was seven years older), each had built an extensive international financial empire in the first decades of the sixteenth century that depended on close contacts with the papacy as well as with other European leaders. Both were eminent patrons of the arts, and each endowed one of the earliest social housing projects to be built on the continent. Their political involvement was extensive if carefully understated: Fugger played a direct role in the Protestant Reformation; Chigi served as a papal ambassador to Venice for Pope Julius II. This lecture will argue that their parallel lives were no coincidence, but rather show careful division of labor and closer communication with one another than has hitherto been suspected.

“Ingrid Rowland’s amazing essays [in From Heaven to Arcadia] are over the top and down the other side. They pop, they sparkle, they inform, and they add up to a rich and vivid mosaic of Renaissance culture, its ancient sources, and its contemporary interpreters. Above all, they show us why deep scholarship and high style matter so much in this gray age of the world's history.” 
— Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History, Princeton University

Ingrid D. Rowland is Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and Professor at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture in Rome. She writes and lectures on Classical Antiquity, the Renaissance, and the Age of the Baroque for general as well as specialist audiences. Professor Rowland’s honors include a Mellon grant and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Villa I Tatti, the American Academy in Rome, and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, she is the author of The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (Cambridge, 1998); The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery (Chicago, 2004); From Heaven to Arcadia: The Sacred and the Profane in the Renaissance (New York Review Books, 2005); Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008); a translation of Bruno's dialogue On the Heroic Frenzies (Toronto, 2013); From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town (Harvard, 2015); and most recently, The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art (Norton), co-written with Noah Charney and forthcoming in October 2017. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002 and in 2010 her book Giordano Bruno was awarded the Helen & Howard R. Marraro Prize by the Society for Italian Historical Studies.

Cotsen Professor in the Humanities 
and Professor of Classics
Princeton University

What is English and How Do We Know?

This sentence is written in English. So, however, are these:

itjmhoF oj ofuujsx tj fdofuoft tjiU
We synt gumcynnes Geata leode
I shall not want
All mimsy were the borogoves
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs
That was a lekker braai, bru
i <3 u

What it means to be English is evidently not a simple matter. In this talk, Joshua T. Katz will consider the state—or, rather, states—of the language in 2017 and compare how things were in the past (1917, 1817, 1017, …); He will also risk looking into the future (2117, 3117, 4117, …). While no one will come away from the lecture with a firm definition of “English,” his hope is that everyone will understand both the historical and the contemporary reasons why it is so difficult to capture the essence of any language and to define its boundaries.

Joshua T. Katz is Cotsen Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics, and a member (and former director) of the Program in Linguistics at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1998. A linguist by training, he is widely published in the languages, literatures, and cultures of the ancient, medieval, and to some extent modern world, with interests from India to Ireland and from the Ancient Near East to the American Southwest. He has received numerous national and international awards for his scholarship, including a Guggenheim Fellowship; has been a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford and a guest professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris) and the Humboldt University of Berlin; and is especially proud of having won all three of Princeton’s major teaching prizes.

Lunch Seminar for UM Humanities Faculty & Graduate Students

There is arguably no bit of text in the Western tradition more famous than the opening six words of the Iliad, which lay out the central theme of Homer’s great epic: Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆοϛ | οὐλομένην“Of the wrath sing, o goddess — the baneful wrath of Achilles son of Peleus.” Despite intensive study since antiquity, there remain things to learn about this poem, and in this talk I will try to explain, in as non-technical a way as possible (though there is no way around certain linguistic details), why a closer look at the words for ‘goddess’ and ‘baneful/damned’ is desirable. Among my conclusions will be that the former tells us something remarkable about actual Homeric performance while the form and meaning of the latter have been repeatedly misunderstood.

Professor of History, Art History, and Film
University of Southern California

Get That Picture!: 
Speed and the Invention of the Global Media Event in Fin-de-Siècle Paris

 Vanessa R. Schwartz is Professor of History, Art History, and Film at the University of Southern California, where she also directs the Visual Studies Research Institute. A historian of modern visual culture, she was trained in Modern European History with a concentration on France and urban culture. She is the author of It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (2007), Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (1998), and Modern France: A Very Short Introduction (2011). She recently co-edited, with Jason Hill, Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News (2015) and is currently writing a book, Jet Age Aesthetics: Media and the Glamour of Motion.  She was awarded a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship and a Cullman Center Fellowship at the New York Public Library.

“[In Spectacular Realities], Schwartz weaves a multilayered history of the evolution of mass entertainments in Paris during the 19^th century. . . an engrossing study.” 
— F. Burkhard, Choice

This lecture examines the emergence of photojournalism in Paris in the last third of the nineteenth century in relation to the importance of changing technologies of speed, especially in relation to the history of transportation. It contextualizes one of the most notorious global media events, “The Dreyfus Affair,” in a broader visual culture of the news in which photography and film emerged as the key modes of news reporting.

Presidential Professor Emerita, CUNY Graduate Center

"Daughters of Liberty: 
Women in the American Revolution"

Thursday, October 30, 2014 — 7:00pm

Carol Berkin, the inaugural speaker of the Edith Bleich series, is Presidential Professor Emerita at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of First Generations: Women in Colonial America(1996); Jonathan Sewall: Odyssey of an American Loyalist (2000); A Brilliant Solution (2002); Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for American Independence (2006); Civil War Wives (2009); and Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte (2014). She is a pioneer in early American women’s history and also the author and editor of numerous textbooks, readers, and teaching guides for women’s history.

“Carol Berkin has merged the craft of the skilled historian and the sensitivity of a master storyteller with her sensibilities as a pioneering scholar of women to produce the best narrative of how women of diverse backgrounds experienced the American Revolution.” 
— Edith Gelles, author of Abigail & John: Portrait of a Marriage

From the protest against the Stamp Act through the long war to the signing of the Peace Treaty in 1783 and beyond, women were active participants in the struggle to establish American independence. These women took over the farms and shops when husbands and sons went to war so that the men would have something to come home to when peace returned. But they did more: as propagandists, fundraisers, spies, saboteurs, nurses, and soldiers, patriot women contributed to American success.  The same desire for freedom that made white women “daughters of liberty” led most African American and Native American women to support the British cause. The American Revolution was therefore not one war but many wars, each fought in the name of liberty and independence.