2024-2025 Stanford Distinguished Professors in the Humanities
Thursday, September 26 @ 5:00 pm
Richter Library, Third Floor Conference Room
"Imagining the Museum of Slavery"
Charles Forsdick, Drapers Professor of French, Cambridge University
Co-Sponsored by the University of Miami Departments of Anthropology, History, & Modern Languages and Literatures.
to register for this lecture.
** We greatly look forward to seeing you at Charles Forsdick’s Stanford Lecture, “Imagining the Museum of Slavery”: 5pm today in Richter Library, Third Floor Conference Room. We’re deeply grateful that the local weather forecast permits us to go on with the show live and in person! See you later this evening! As always, we will be recording the talk and promptly adding it to the Center’s YouTube Channel.
The Center for the Humanities, along with colleagues from the University of Miami, would like to invite you to a public lecture by Professor Charles Forsdick.
The inauguration of the International Slavery Museum (ISM) in Liverpool in 2007 has provided a template for early twenty-first-century institutions seeking to engage with innovative museology relating to the representations of enslavement. Charles Forsdick will situate the imagination of ISM as a museum of slavery as a foundational case study in the broader context of national commemorations (in response to whose customary foregrounding of philanthropy and legislative approaches to abolition, it asserted the agency of the enslaved). Forsdick suggests that the Liverpool museum provided an experimental space in which it was possible to imagine the purpose, define the content and test the parameters of a lieu de mémoire devoted to slavery, the legacies of enslavement and anti-racist education. He will explore the ways in which the Liverpool museum has gone on to serve as a point of reference to inspire the development of museums of slavery, where these institutions draw on aspects of ISM to situate themselves in their own complex, multi-layered cityscapes and memoryscapes. As further sites have been developed, including new museums and memorials in the USA, the need to understand the genealogies of the museum of slavery, with their national variations and international trends, has become increasingly urgent.
Charles Forsdick is a Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge and Professorial Fellow at Murray Edwards College. His teaching and research interests include: Francophone postcolonial studies, particularly postcolonial literature; French colonial history and postcolonial memory; travel writing and exoticism; translation studies; world literature and graphic fiction. He has served as President of the Society for French Studies, 2012-14 and as Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of International Slavery, 2010-13. A Member of the Academy of Europe and Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, he is also currently Lead Fellow for Languages at the British Academy. Charles is also Honorary Professor in the Centre for the Study of International Slavery at the University of Liverpool. He edits or co-edits three series for Liverpool University Press, and since 2019, has been a member of the conseil scientifique of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de l’Esclavage.
for additional information about Professor Forsdick.
Sunday, December 8, 2024 @ 11:00 am
Lecture Location: Gables Campus, TBA
Virgil Ortiz, Artist and Designer
Co-organized with the Lowe Art Museum
for the bio of Virgil Ortiz.
Registration and additional information forthcoming...
Thursday, February 20, 2025 @ 7:00 pm
Kislak Center at the University of Miami
Ada Limón, 24th Poet Laureate of the United States
for the bio of Ada Limón
Registration and additional information forthcoming...
Thursday, March 20, 2025 @ 5:00 pm
Richter Library, Third Floor Conference Room
Marlene Daut, Professor of French & African Diaspora Studies, Yale University
for the bio of Marlene Daut
Registration and additional information forthcoming...
