Past Event Category: Lectures and Talks
-
Feb 27“Domesticity of Governance & Politics of Dependency in the Oyo Empire, 1600-1836”
Akin Ogundiran (Northwestern University)
Sewell Social Sciences, Rm 8417
Anthropology Colloquium This talk examines the Oyo Empire (ca. 1600–1836) through the lens of domesticity, household organization, and the politics of dependency. Multi-sited excavations in the metropolis (Oyo-Ile) and the colony of Ede-Ile suggest the Oyo Empire was constituted through layered domestic practices and that governance was deeply household-centered. Beyond solely formal political institutions, everyday …
-
Feb 26“Cultural Life in Constantinople during the Siege of 1453”
Anthony Kaldellis (University of Chicago)
Education L196
War in Society and Culture Program’s Spring 2026 Speaker Series Marquee Lecture The fall of Constantinople in 1453 marked the end of the Roman (Byzantine) empire and enabled the Ottomans to become a world power. Most attention on the siege has focused on its military aspects, including the deployment of huge cannons against the city’s ancient walls. But the …
-
Feb 25“Moroccan Jews, American Jews, and French Decolonization in North Africa, 1945-1955”
Emma Kuby (UW-Madison, Department of History)
206 Ingraham Hall (1155 Observatory Drive, Madison)
Africa at Noon In the aftermath of the Holocaust, some American Jewish organizations turned their attention to French colonial North Africa as “one of the great reservoirs of Jewish life” that remained on the globe. Indeed, the nearly half million Jews who lived under French rule in Algeria, Tunisia, and especially Morocco in 1945 outnumbered …
-
Feb 19“Migration, Resilience, and Community Building in Times of Crisis”
Stephanie Canizales (UC Berkeley), Gina Pérez (Oberlin College), Gilberto Rosas (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Memorial Library 126 & Online
Chicanx/e & Latinx/e Studies Program Speaker Series: Building Communities of Care and Resilience in Times of Crisis This panel focuses on migration and the resiliency of immigrants and displaced citizens as they navigate legal terrains, state bureaucracies, and a sense of belonging through community networks and placemaking. Want to attend virtually? Register online to receive …
-
Feb 19“Why Did Mrs. Gandhi Impose the Emergency, and Why Did She Lift It? Revising the Indian Emergency of 1975”
Peter Ronald deSouza (University of Johannesburg)
206 Ingraham Hall & Zoom
Zoom: https://go.wisc.edu/8rg7q4 Presented by Center for South Asia Co-sponsored by the Harvey Goldberg Center and the UW Havens Wright Center for Social Justice
-
Feb 17“Reading to Live: From Symbolic Act to the Activity of Form”
Jensen Suther (Harvard University)
Elvehjem Building L166
In Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, he develops an “allegorical” approach to Marxist criticism, according to which literary works are “coded” representations of class struggle. Jameson understands literary works as “symbolic acts” that respond to social antagonisms by resolving them in an idealized narrative form. The task of the critic, on this account, is to …
-
Feb 13“History or Story? Remembering and Rewriting the Past”
Tuba Baykara (Nevşehir Hacı Bektaş Veli University)
Memorial Union & Online
Karpat Talks This talk examines how Yuva (2012; originally Home, a novel written in English by Toni Morrison and later translated into Turkish) and Cümbezin Kızı (2023, a novel originally written in Turkish by Ülkü Demiray) use storytelling to reconstruct the past by weaving together memory, place, and identity, demonstrating how cultural memory transforms …
-
Jan 29“Depicting the Holy War: Crusader Imagery in Medieval French and English Murals”
Elizabeth Lapina (UW-Madison)
Curti Lounge (5233 Mosse Humanities)
This presentation, based on a recently published monograph, will discuss perceptions and representations of the crusades in Western Europe, specifically in France and England, as revealed in a type of source that few historians of the crusades have discussed: twelfth and thirteenth-century mural paintings in France and England. The talk will attempt to demonstrate that …
-
Jan 23History of Science Medicine and Technology Colloquium with Honghong Tinn
Honghong Tinn (University of Minnesota)
Curti Lounge (5233 Mosse Humanities)
-
Dec 4“Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature”
Alyssa Battistoni (Barnard College)
Online via Zoom and Sewell Social Science Bldg., Room 8417
Alyssa Battistoni is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, where she works and teaches on climate and environmental politics, capitalism, Marxism, feminism, and other topics in contemporary social and political thought. She is the author of Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton 2025) and the co-author of A Planet to …