Event

Prof. Fiona Vernal Participates in Hartford Heritage Series

UConn History Professor Fiona Vernal delivered a talk on Shade Tobacco Stories: Land, Labor, and Immigration in the CT Tobacco Valley. As a part of Capitol Community College’s virtual history heritage series, Prof. Vernal gives us a deeper appreciation of the local histories that go forgotten between the larger national stories that influence yet take center stage in the narratives we tell about the past. She illustrates the connections and collaborations that people of West Indian, Caribbean, and African descent fostered as they labored and organized to create political communities and social networks.  The making of tobacco culture in CT is one that Prof. Vernal details with passion and dedication.

Listen to her talk on the CT Old State House page and read this Hartford Courant article that chronicles the work of historians throughout the region laboring to bring the history of Hartford and its surrounding areas to the fore. The whole series is on the CT Old State House page!

 

11/11-11/12: Gender and History Series with Mariana P. Candido

November 2021 Gender and History FlyerBetween November 11-12, UConn History will host Emory Professor Mariana P. Candido as a part of the annual Gender & History Series. Professor Candido’s training is in African history, and her work explores gender, property, and land in Angola. Professor Candido will discuss her research in a public lecture and workshop:

Thursday, November 11

Public Lecture | Storrs Campus, Class of ’47 Room in Homer Babbidge Library | 4:30-6pm

“Wealth and Accumulation in Angola: A History of Dispossession and Inequality”

Friday, November 12

Workshop | Storrs Campus, Wood Hall Basement Lounge | 10-11:30am

“Gendered Strategies to Secure Property in 19th century Angola”

*(a pre-circulated paper is available – email Cornelia Dayton at cornelia.dayton@uconn.edu)

 

 

 

10/28-10/29: Facing History with Manisha Sinha and Jeffrey Ogbar

Facing History Promo FlyerOn October 28 and 29, Professor Manisha Sinha and and Professor Jeffrey Ogbar will present two events with the Benton Museum of Art. They will engage in a discussion about the new “Facing History” exhibition that explores race, gender, and colonialism. Please RSVP to benton@uconn.edu. 

10/28 Facing History Gallery Talk With Jeffrey Ogbar 

Thursday, October 28th, 2021 

03:30 PM – 05:00 PM 

Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, Professor of History and Director, Center for the Study of Popular Music at UConn, presents a playlist inspired by the exhibition, Facing History. 

Followed by hot cider and donuts in The Benton courtyard. 

10/29 Facing History Faculty Dialogue With Manisha Sinha And Kelli Morgan 

Friday, October 29th, 2021
02:00 PM – 03:00 PM

With Manisha Sinha, James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at UConn, and Kelli Morgan, Director of Curatorial Studies at Tufts University. 

10/14 and 10/15: Encounters Series on Land Grab CT and A Dialogue on UConn’s Colonial History

This week,  Native American Cultural Programs (NACP) and the Native American and Indigenous Students Association (NAISA) will host several dialogues that interrogate the relationship between colonialism, dispossession, and indigenous sovereignty. On Thursday, October 14 at 4pm EDT, the creators of Land Grab U, Tristan Ahtone and Bobby Lee will discuss the role of land grant universities in land accumulation, wealth and indigenous dispossession.  On Friday, October 15, the dialogue continues at 12pm EDT.  For both events, please fill out the Google doc form to register.

More event information below:

9/23: Hana Maruyama Virtual Forum with Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry

New UConn History Prof. Hana Maruyama will participate in a virtual forum on “Animating Memories of Japanese American Incarceration”  with the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry.Assistant Professor Hana Maruyama image This event is a part of their Fall 2021 Puppet Forum Series and exhibit on Puppetry’s Racial Reckoning.  In collaboration with  theater artist Kimi Maeda, Hana Maruyama will discuss the impact and legacies of Japanese incarceration during World War II.  The discussion will take place on Thursday, 9/23 at 7pm EDT on Zoom. Follow this link to learn more about the event and be sure to register! 

9/22: Manisha Sinha and Sandra Rebok Virtual Talk on Alexander Von Humboldt’s Legacy

On Wednesday, 9/22, join Prof. Manisha Sinha from the University of Connecticut  and Dr. Sandra Rebok from the University of California San Diego, for a virtual discussion titled, “Confronting History: The Legacy of Alexander von Humboldt’s Encounter with the Americas in the 21st Century.” The event will take place on Wednesday, 9/22 at 12pm EDT. The talk is co-sponsored by UConn’ Office of Global Affairs and the German Consulate General Boston  as a part of their series on the afterlives of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism.  Registration for the event is still open!

9/22: Brendan Kane Presents at Jesus College Oxford

Prof. Brendan Kane will deliver a virtual talk about “Elizabeth I and Ireland: The Irish and England” on Wednesday, 9/22 at 1pm EDT (6pm BST). Prof. Kane’s presentation will be the first in Jesus College Oxford’s popular event series,  Celebrating the Elizabethan College. Registration for the event closes on Monday, September 20 at 7am EDT (12pm BST).

The event description (as posted by Jesus College Oxford):

We are delighted to open our events programme for this academic year with a talk that is part of our ever-popular series of events, Celebrating the Elizabethan College. On this occasion we are fortunate to be joined by Dr Brendan Kane, Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut, who will examine the relationship between Jesus College’s foundress and the people of Ireland, and how its legacy can still be felt in the modern political landscape.

 

 

 

“Key Texts” In Modern Chinese Political Thought Conference

Fifteen scholars from China, Taiwan, and Europe, as well as the US, met on September 27 and 28, 2019 to discuss selected key texts written by Chinese intellectuals and political activists from the late Qing period (1890s) through the Republican period (1912-1949). The conference was held at UConn-Hartford.

 

The texts ranged from well-known works by Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and Mao Zedong to lesser-known writings of Yang Du and Ding Shan. The conference’s discussions were held in English and Chinese. Duan Lian, Pablo Blitstein, Wang Fansen, Gao Bo, Carl K.Y. Shaw, Wen Yu, Mara Yue Du, Axel Schneider, Gu Hongliang, Thomas Fröhlich, Li Yongjin, Shellen Wu, and Peter Zarrow gave papers, while discussants were Stephen Angle, Alexus McLeod, and Fred Lee.

 

The goals of the conference were to highlight new scholarship on the rich political theorizing of the period, and to help establish modern Chinese political thought as a field not only important in its own right but of interest to non-Sinophone scholars working on political theory, comparative politics, and global intellectual history. We collectively hope to continue to pursue these goals in the future. In terms of making modern Chinese political thought more transparent outside this sub-field, we will work on providing complete translations of key texts and, separately, introductions to them. These introductions will provide basic information on the text’s author, its context, its contents and significance, and its reception and influence. Both translations of complete texts and introductions to them should be of use to scholars and students. At the moment, we lack these scholarly tools—most of the translations we have are highly abridged or limited to a small number of political leaders (Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong). And the monographic literature speaks mostly to specialists.

 

Papers and discussion at the UConn conference centered around such themes as materiality, utopianism, and temporality, as well as more familiar topics such as secularization, legitimacy, and rights and liberty. We did not come up with a clear definition of what constitutes a “key text” and do not want to establish a canon, but rather we hope to keep open what texts are of historical and contemporary interest. Loosely speaking, we can put key texts into one of two categories: historical importance as defined by the text’s reception and influence (at the time it was disseminated or later); and intrinsic interest as defined by the text’s originality and argumentation. This conference made no attempt to claim the texts discussed could possibly represent the spectrum of political thought in twentieth-century China, but it did include texts that represented a variety of opinion—articles and books by Kang Youwei, Zhang Zhidong, Liang Qichao, Zhang Taiyan, Yang Du, Chen Duxiu, Liang Shuming, Ding Shan, Luo Longji, and Mao Zedong.

 

Much Chinese writing of the period of course constituted adoption, adaptation, and reflections on ideas that originated in Euro-America and Japan (or via Japan). At the same time, the influence of Confucian and Buddhist ideas on particular texts was profound. In approaching key texts, it is necessary to keep in mind various authors’ particular and original interpretations of the of the questions they were asking. The afterlife of texts is also worth considering; for example, China today has seen a revival of certain texts written a hundred years ago such as writings of Kang Youwei, which interest New Confucians, and writings of Zhang Taiyan (Binglin), which interest New Left thinkers.

 

In addition to opening up the question of the exact bases of modern Chinese political thought by focusing on key texts, this conference also raised the question of what counts as “political thought” in the first place. Discussions turned to the problem of the hegemony of Western political methodologies and problems, the need to encourage more comparative work, and the advantages of interdisciplinary scholarship, especially among historians, political theorists, and philosophers.

 

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Sponsors of the conference were the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation; and UConn’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean’s Office, Asian and Asian American Studies Institute, Humanities Institute, Department of History, Office of Global Affairs, and Department of Philosophy. Photo Credit: Jason Chang.

History Dept. Participates in Dialogue on Race & Community

On November 19, members of the History Department joined the broader UConn community to further the discussion of how to improve the University’s support of racial justice. The Dialogue on Race and Community – a two hour gathering that included a moderated dialogue, the sharing of personal stories, and small group discussions – hoped “that such listening can lead to understanding, and from understanding can come actions that make UConn a more just, equitable, and inclusive community.”

Dialogue on Race and Community

The event was hosted by Glenn Mitoma, Neag/Director of the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, and co-moderated by Dominique Battle-Lawson, Neag, and Brendan Kane/History, Director of the Dodd Center’s Democracy and Dialogues Initiative. For more information about the event, click here. A statement from Director Mitoma can be found here.