The JCB Library will be hosting open hours on Friday, May 19, 2023 to celebrate their newly accessible physical and digital spaces. The order of events are as below:
Speaker and Award Presentation
3 p.m. | College Green
University and JCB Library leadership will provide remarks and present the JCB Award for Outstanding Service and Scholarship to
Dr. María Isabel Grañén Porrúa, scholar, philanthropist and a leader in libraries and archives of the Americas.
Library Tours
3-5 p.m. | JCB Library, 94 George St.
Tour the renovation of the historic building’s west entrance, explore the new exhibit, “1846: Inventing Americana at the John Carter Brown Library,” and learn more about the library’s new digital platform.
Reception
5-6:30 p.m. | Hope Club, 71 Waterman Street
Enjoy light refreshments with University and library leadership and other invited guests.
Presenting cross-cultural and trans-historical connections rooted in a deep engagement with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, the fellows’ research this year evades easy classification by circumventing traditional disciplinary boundaries and exploring exciting new avenues of inquiry across the humanities, social sciences, and cultural heritage preservation.
Taking place virtually on Zoom from May 4 through May 19, 10 AM and 1 PM on Thursdays and Fridays, this year’s events will feature 47 fellows presenting 20-minute talks. All sessions will be followed by rich panel discussions benefitting from the insights and expertise of staff from across curatorial and conservation. Registration is required for the virtual presentations.
Fellows will also activate their research onsite and in-person on Fridays, May 5, 12 (The Cloisters), and 19 through talks, musical performances, and other exciting activations of the galleries. This event is included with museum admission and registration is not required.
During the Spring of 2023, Boston University’s Archaeology Program will be hosting a series of lectures. The next lecture is An Archaeology of Settler Capitalism and will take place Wednesday, April 12th from 12:20 pm–1:10 pm*, STO 253, 675 Commonwealth Ave., Boston. Dr. Eric Johnson from Brown University will be sharing their work.
Abstract
From at least 1750 until 1900, Euro-American settlers of New York and New Jersey appropriated the production of Indigenous North American shell beads, namely wampum. The cottage industry was initially driven primarily by Euro-American women, but by the mid-19th century, bead-making in New Jersey went through a process of partial industrialization, culminating in the Campbell Wampum Factory. As American imperialism shifted from the Old Northwest to the Plains, new bead styles emerged from the factory’s drilling machines and water-powered grinding wheels, including hair pipes, a style iconic of Native Plains identity. Analysis of museum collections, new excavations, and merchant ledger manuscripts reveal details of settler beadmaking from 1770 to 1900, including temporalities of production, waste, and racial and gendered labor dynamics in transition to factory production. Conclusions warrant greater archaeological attention to the relationship between capitalist industrialization, settler-colonial dispossession, and Indigenous resistance.
Dr. Johnson’s Bio
Eric Johnson is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Art and Architecture in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. He earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University in 2021. His research combines archaeological and historical methods to examine intersecting effects of colonialism and capitalism in North America, specifically northern New Jersey. His current book project, “An Archaeology of Settler Capitalism: Appropriating and Industrializing Wampum Manufacture in New Jersey (1770–1900),” exposes the entwined nature of capitalist and settler ideologies through the untold story of Euro-American settlers who produced Indigenous shell beads for export to the fur trade.
*Dr. Eric Johnson has offered to stay until around 2 pm to talk with interested members of the BU Archaeology community. Following the talk, you are welcome to stay and continue the conversation with him.
Global climate change policy is not enough: environmental damage emerges patch by patch. It is up close and personal as well as planetary. Perhaps what we need is a “field guide” to the feral, that is, to nonhuman responses to human building projects that are out of human control: from noxious weeds to plagues to out-of-control carbon-dioxide emissions. This talk shows how we might address the Anthropocene in its granular particularity—while still attending to the global and the planetary.
Currently Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is an internationally renowned anthropologist. In addition to over forty articles, Prof Tsing is the author of several award-winning books, including In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (1995) and Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005). In 2010, Prof. Tsing received a Guggenheim Fellowship, during which she wrote her multiple award–winning book, The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), which considers how the matsutake mushroom is a figure for understanding global dilemmas of capitalism and the environment. Between 2013 and 2018, Prof. Tsing was Niels Bohr Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, where she established a transdisciplinary program encompassing the humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and the arts in an exploration of the “Anthropocene,” i.e., the geologic epoch defined by human disturbance of the earth’s ecosystems. From that project, she co-curated Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene (2021), a multi-disciplinary digital exploration of the Anthropocene. She is currently co-authoring a book that draws from that project, entitled Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene.
