MEMHS: 19 Sept., 4:30 PM – Dillon Webster (Graduate Student, History Department, Brown University,) “Conquered Lands, Strengthened Hands.” There is a pre-circulated paper for this talk.
MEMHS: 17 Oct. Tiraana Bains (Assistant Professor, History Department, Brown University), TBA
MEMHS: 16 Nov. 16, 5:30 PM – 44th William Church Lecture by Jennifer Morgan (NYU); “On Race and Reinscription: Writing Enslaved Women into the Early Modern Archive.”
In this talk, Jennifer L. Morgan uses the history of three black women from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to explore questions of methodology and archives in the early history of the black Atlantic. Through evidence from visual art, law, and commerce Morgan considers the challenges and possibilities of crafting a social-historical study of women whose voices are so often absent from the archival record but whose lives and perspectives have proven to be essential for comprehending the origins of racial capitalism.
MEMHS: 28 Nov. (Due to the Thanksgiving Break, MEMHS is moved forward to November 28), 4:30 PM – Gershon D. Hundert (Leanor Segal Professor of Jewish Studies, McGill University. (This is a joint event, MEMHS & Judaic Studies, Brown University). TBA
27 Feb. ( Due to the Winter Break / Long Weekend, MEMHS is moved to February 27), 4:30 PM: Elizabeth Nielsen (Graduate Student, History Department, Brown University), TBA
MEMHS: 19 March – Amanda Valdes (Postdoctoral Fellow, History Department, Brown University), TBA
MEMHS: 16 April – Hussein Fancy (Associate Professor, Yale University), TBA
MEMHS: 27 Sept., 4:30 PM – Andrew Romig (NYU Gallatin). “The Wrong Kind of Flattery: Critique and Praise in Walahfrid Strabo’s De imagine Tetrici.”
Walahfrid Strabo’s De imagine Tetrici (On the Image of Tetricus) juxtaposes panegyric for Louis the Pious with an embellished and stylized reflection on an equestrian statue of Theodoric the Great that allegedly stood on the Aachen palace grounds. This essay explores the possibility that an encomium for Louis at the end of the poem, performed in the voice of Strabo himself, is actually a mocking representation of bad panegyric art, the kind of empty and fawning flattery that leads an emperor astray and to which Carolingian leadership had perhaps, according to the poem’s central allusion, fallen victim.
MEMHS: 25 October, 4:30PM – Elias Muhanna (Brown University). “The Unlettered Prophet.”
This paper explores the history of Arabic in the early seventh century, focusing on evidence supplied by the Quran and its textual record. It synthesizes various debates relating to the transition from Old Arabic to Classical Arabic that began in the mid-19th century and places them in the context of new developments in Quranic paleography and codicology.
MEMHS: 3 November, 5:30P. 43rd William Church Lecture, John Jeffries Martin (Duke University), “From the Apocalypse to the Idea of Progress in Early Modern Europe.”
In the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century, Europeans expressed their hopes for the future within an apocalyptic, even millenarian frame. But in the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth century a new language of hope emerged as the Idea of Progress took hold. This presentation explores this transition with attention both to the emergence of secular values and to shifting notions of Divine Providence in the early modern world.
John Jeffries Martin is a historian of early modern Europe, with particular interests in the social, cultural, and intellectual history of Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is the author of Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (1993), winner of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (2004), and A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World (2022) as well as some 50 articles and essays.