The Boston Seminar on the History of Women, Gender, & Sexuality is a collaboration of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America and the Massachusetts Historical Society. This series, whose five meetings in 2017-2018 will alternate between the Radcliffe Institute and the MHS, aims to seed fresh conversations on the history of women, gender, and sexuality in America without chronological limitations. Some sessions will offer the opportunity to discuss new scholarship presented in pre-circulated essays. This fall, two sessions will include members of the UConn History department:

 

October 17, 2017
Tuesday, 5:30PM – 7:45PM
Location: Fay House, Radcliffe Institute

 

Discussion: Gender, Sexuality, and the New Labor History

Anne G. Balay, Haverford College; Aimee Loiselle, University of Connecticut; Traci L. Parker, UMass-Amherst
Moderator: Seth Rockman, Brown University

The “New Labor History” is highly gendered, global, and often situated in spaces that are transitory or obscured. This session will consider the new directions that the path-breaking work of these three scholars indicates: on female, trans, and intersex truck drivers and state surveillance (Balay), on Puerto Rican needleworkers and the global working class (Loiselle), and on African American women workers in the post-Civil Rights Era (Parker). Note: There are no pre-circulated essays for this session.

 

December 19, 2017
Tuesday, 5:30PM – 7:45PM
Location: Massachusetts Historical Society

 

Miss America’s Politics: Beauty and the Development of the New Right since 1968

Micki McElya, University of Connecticut
Comment: Genevieve A. Clutario, Harvard University

Drawn from McElya’s larger book project, this essay examines the centrality of the Miss America pageant, its local networks, and individual contestants to the rise of activist conservative women and the New Right in the 1960s and 1970s. It analyzes the celebration, power, and political effects of normative beauty, steeped in heterosexual gender norms and white supremacy, and argues for the transformative effect of putting diverse women’s voices at the center of political history and inquiry.

Seminars are free and open to the public; RSVP required. To RSVP: email seminars@masshist.org or call (617) 646-0579.

 

Please join us for the first Foreign Policy Seminar of Fall 2017!

The guest speaker is Daniel Immerwahr of Northwestern University. The title of his talk is “Nobody Knows in America, Puerto Rico’s in America: Colonial Medicine, Militant Nationalism, and the U.S. Empire.”

The talk will be held on Friday, September 22 in the Wood Hall Basement Lounge. A reception with refreshments will start at 4:30pm and the talk will begin at 5pm.

Professor Immerwahr is an historian of the United States and the world, serving in the history department at Northwestern University. His first book, Thinking Small (Harvard, 2015), offers a critical account of the United States’ pursuit of grassroots development at home and abroad in the middle of the twentieth century. He is currently working on another book, How to Hide an Empire, about the United States’ overseas territory.

“Describing English/Algonquian Space/Place: Using Historical Maps, GIS, and Spatial Theory”

Nathan’s workshop will consider the challenges and rewards of a spatial approach to the history of 17th-century New England through the discussion of three different kinds of maps: English maps, Algonquian maps, and Historians’ maps. While all important, each of the maps lend themselves to different kinds of analysis and different pitfalls.

Please plan on attending and joining in the conversation with Nathan. We will meet as usual in the Wood Hall basement lounge. We will get started at our customary time of 12:15 p.m.

David Mayers
Boston University

“After Armageddon: International Society and the United States, 1945-1956”
 

Reception 4:30pm, Presentation 5:00pm

Contact Frank Costigliola (frank.costigliola@uconn.edu) if you wish to stay for the dinner following the talk ($12 for students, $20 for faculty)

Omeka Workshop
March 7 at 11am in EC-1
This workshop will provide an overview of the Omeka tool.  Omeka allows users to build digital exhibitions and create simple web pages.  We will cover the basics of creating an Omeka account and adding items, collections, and exhibits.  This workshop is designed for the beginner and does not require any previous knowledge of Omeka.

 

GIS Workshop

March 8 at 3pm in EC-1
This workshop will introduce the basics of interactive web mapping using CartoDB, an open platform for data visualization.  It is a great tool for those who are interested in web mapping, but have no experience in web programming. You will learn how to upload various types of data, use filters, customize your map symbols and share a final online map. Perfect for beginners – no specific experience required.

 

If you’re interested in attending one of these workshops, please register at the following link: http://workshops.lib.uconn.edu/

HUMANITIES IN ACTION
Panel & Discussion with the Initiative on Campus Dialogues (ICD)
Wednesday, March 8, 2:00-3:30
Humanities Institute (4th floor, Babbidge Library)

In the latest event in our Career Pathways series, Marla Miller of UMass will be speaking on “Artisans and Entrepreneurs in the 21st Century Humanities: Graduate Education as Maker-Space” on Monday, 6 March, 12pm-1:15pm, UCHI Conference Room, 4th Floor, Babbidge Library.

At 4pm, we will have a Career Pathways roundtable on “Public History at Multiple Scales”, featuring Marla Miller, Bea Gurwitz of the National Humanities Alliance, and our own Nick Hurley in the Wood Hall Basement Lounge.

Both these events are co-sponsored by the Department of History, the Humanities Institute, and a Career Diversity Grant from the American Historical Association.

The Hartford History Center at Hartford Public Library, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute, are launching a community engagement partnership with a new discussion series called Encounters. The partners will provide discussion leaders to engage in topics aimed at strengthening our ability to know ourselves and one another through respectful and challenging dialogue. This February and March, Encounters will focus on the fundamental documents that define our democracy.

go to the full article

Brown Bag Event
Wednesday, February 8
Wood Hall Basement Lounge
12:15-1:30pm

Kay Gruder from the Center for Career Development will be doing a presentation on using “The Versatile Ph.D.” website. Kay is a specialist in helping graduate students at the Center for Career Development, and getting to know her, as well as this valuable subscription website, will be helpful to all.

This site is a valuable on-line tool for graduate students considering careers outside traditional academic settings. https://versatilephd.com/
 
The Career Pathways Series is supported by an AHA Career Diversity Grant, the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, and the Department of History.

“Digital Pathways in History”

Lecture
UConn Humanities Institute Conference Room
Babbidge Library, 4th floor
1:00-2:15pm

Dan Cohen
“The Digital Public Library of America and the History Around Us”
 
Dr. Cohen is the founding Executive Director of the Digital Public Library of America, which is bringing together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and making them freely available to the world. Until 2013, he was Professor of History in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and the Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. He is co-author of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), author of Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), and co-editor of Hacking the Academy (University of Michigan Press, 2012).
 

Career Pathways Roundtable
Wood Hall Basement Lounge
4:30pm

Speakers:
Dr. Cohen, (Ph.D. Yale University), Executive Director, Digital Public Library of America
Sara Georgini, (Ph.D. Candidate, Boston University), Assistant Editor, The Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society
Professor Tom Scheinfeldt (D.Phil., Oxford University), Associate Professor of Digital Media and Design and Director of Digital Humanities in the Digital Media Center, UConn
Sara Sikes, UConn University Archives, Special Collections & Digital Curation, Scholarly Communications Design Studio Coordinator

Light refreshments will be served from 4-4:30. The roundtable will begin at 4:30.