Wednesday Workshops

The History Department hosts Wednesday Workshops several times throughout the semester to further scholarly dialogue among graduate students, faculty, and visiting scholars. In the form of a brownbag lunch, the speaker presents their research-in-progress and then engages in a Q&A with the audience. Workshops generally take place from 12:15 – 1:15 in the Wood Hall Basement Lounge. Please contact Professor Nancy Shoemaker at nancy.shoemaker@uconn.edu if you are interested in presenting at or attending a Wednesday Workshop.

UConn History Department Wednesday Workshops (2013-2024)

Spring 2024

January 31

Katharine Beene, History, UConn, “Párliament na mBan as Political Satire and Conduct Manual in Late 17th-Century Ireland”

March 20

Thomas Maulucci, History, UConn, “Selling the German Democratic Republic: DEFA’s ‘Foreign Ministry Films”

April 17

Mars Plater, History, UConn, “Gardens of Pleasure and Profit: Commercial Green Spaces in New York City, 1800-1850

Fall 2023

November 15

Stephen Vider, History, UConn, “On Our Own: Psychiatric Deinstitutionalization and the Politics of Care”

October 18

Will Theiss, History, UConn, “Reading Wrong: Humanistic Failure and the Philosophy of Justus Lipsius (1547-1606)”

Spring 2023

April 19

Avery McGraw, History, UConn, “We of My Kind: Transnational Medical Discourse and Trans* Identity Formation in 1950s Italy”

March 29

Joel Blatt, History, UConn, “Remembering Vietnam”

Fall 2022

October 12

Alejandra Monti, Universidad Nacional de Rosario/ CONICET, “Technical Assistance as Strategy: The Ford Foundation’s Regional and Urban Planning in Argentina and Chile, 1960-1973″

September 28

Luke Reynolds, History, UConn, “Who Owned Waterloo? Battle, Memory, and Myth in British History, 1815-1852″

Spring 2022

April 27

David Evans, History, UConn, “Did the United States Really Go to War in Afghanistan?”

April 6

Anna Kittredge, History, UConn; Adam Brookes, novelist and former BBC correspondent, “Writing About Espionage”

Fall 2021 

December 8

Christopher Clark, History, UConn, “Global Capitalism Meets Settler Colonialism: The Wyoming Range War of the Early 1890s”

November 10

Peter Zarrow, History, UConn, “Abolishing Boundaries: Global Utopias in the Formation of Modern Chinese Political Thought, 1880-1940”

October 13

Bradley Simpson,  History, UConn, “Using E-Reader Platform ‘Perusall’ for Teaching”

Victor Zatsepine, History, UConn, “Zoom, Zoom, Zoom! Hosting Your Own Meeting”

September 29

Cornelia Dayton, History, UConn, ” Lost Years Recovered: John Peters and Phillis Wheatley Peters in Middletown”

Spring 2021

April 7

Daniel Hershenzon, LCL, UConn, “Islamic Institutions and Slaves’ Collective Action in 18th Century Spain”

Fall 2020

December 2

Joseph McAlhany, History, UConn, “An Irysheman Lost & Found”

September 30

Walter Woodward, History, UConn and State Historian of Connecticut, “Creating Connecticut: Critical Moments That Shaped a Great State.”

Spring 2020

February 26

Jason Chang, History & Director of AAASI, UConn, “Connecticut’s Tobacco Valley: Imperialism, Migration, and Internal Colonization”

March 25 

Tom Balcerski, History, Eastern Connecticut State University, “Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King”

April 1

Jonathan Michaels, History, UConn-Hartford, “The Liberal Dilemma: The Pragmatic Tradition in the Age of McCarthyism”

Fall 2019 

October 2 

Graduate Student Teaching Brown Bag Forum.

October 30

Thoko Sipungu, Rhodes University, and Siyanda Ntlabathi, University of Fort Hare. Visiting Scholars Presentation: “Internationalization and Africanization in the era of Decolonization” (Ntlabathi) & “Masculinity and Disability in the Eastern Cape, South Africa” (Sipungu)

November 6

James Kolb, UConn ’19. “Cemetery Analysis: Where History and GIS Converge”

December 15

Glenn Gordinier, Munson Institute of American Maritime Studies, “From Selfish Pleasure to Personal Commitment: Oral History and the Maturity of Global Surf Culture”

Spring 2019

January 30 

Helen Rozwadowski, History, UConn-Avery Point, “Wild Blue: Legacy of the Post-World War II Perception of Ocean as Frontier”

February 27

Brendan Kane, History, UConn, “Digital humanities, language acquisition and expanding the historical archive: ‘Léamh.org – Learning Early Modern Irish’”

March 27

Jonathan Schroeder, English and Comparative Literary Studies, Warwick University, “Bondservants of Liberty: The Jacobs Family and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793”

April 10

Katherine R. Jewell, History, Fitchburg State University, “The  Square Origins of the ‘Left of the Dial’: College Radio and Student Protest Movements, 1969–1973”

Fall 2018

October 3

Matthew Guariglia, History, UConn, “The American Problem: Race, Empire, and Policing in New York City”

October 24

Peter C. Baldwin, History, UConn, “The Social Mouth in a New Era of American Public Health, 1880-1920”

November 7

Shelley E. Rose, History, Cleveland State University, “What Happens When Historians Think About Space? Mapping Twentieth-Century Protest Events in the U.S. and Germany”

November 28

Edward Guimont, History, UConn, “Colonialism from the Gretaceous: Ancient Aliens, Modern Dinosaurs, and the Lizard People Conspiracy”

December 5

Mlamuli Hlatshwayo, Rhodes University and Vuyani Booim, University of Fort Hare, “The Decolonizing Movement in South Africa: Two Views from Archives and Curriculum Studies”

Spring 2018

January 31

Victor Zatsepine and Megan Streit, History, UConn, Panel “City of Hope: Vladivostok at the Crossroads”

February 28

David Evans, History, UConn, “Food Politics and the Cold War”

March 28

Winifred Maloney, History, UConn, “Career Diversity in Humanities”

April 11

Nicola Carpentieri, LCL, UConn, “Arab Poets in Norman Sicily”

Fall 2017

October 4

Sharmishtha Roy Chowdhury, History, UConn, “Those Long Months in the Hideous Flat”: The First World War, the Mesopotamian Campaign, and Reimagining British India, 1914-1919”

November 8

Laurence Langer, Victor Zatsepine, History, UConn; Chris Vials, English, Roundtable “Reflections on the Russian Revolution after 100 Years”

November 29

Facundo Martín (CONICET/ UN Cuyo) & Mark Healey, History, UConn, “Pumping the Future Dry: Expansion, Expertise, and Collapse in the Irrigated Grapelands of Argentina, 1950-1990”

Spring 2017

February 15

Nathan Braccio, History, UConn, “Algonquian and English Geographies”

April 26

Joel Blatt, UConn Stamford, “Why Hitler Murdered the Jews According to Timothy Snyder, Others, and Me”

Fall 2016

October 5

Ricardo Raul Salazar Rey, History, UConn, “Comparing Spanish and British Legal and Economic Justifications for Slavery”

November 9

Aimee Loiselle, History, UConn, “Beyond Norma Rae: Puerto Rican Needleworkers and Striking Mill Hands”

December 7 

Richard Brown, History, UConn, “Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War”

Spring 2016

March 30

Alexis Dudden, History, UConn, “The New Map of Japan: World War III All Over Again?”

April 13

Jeff Egan, History, UConn, “The Swift River Valley and the Creation of Boston’s Quabbin Reservoir, 1880-1945”

Fall 2015

September 16

Charles Lansing, History, UConn, “Telling the Story of West Germany’s Nazi Hunters: the Central Agency, the Extermination of Latvia’s Jews, and Postwar Attitudes about the Nazi Past”

November 11

Mary Mahoney, History, UConn, “Taking a Literary Pulse: A History of the Use of Reading to Heal the Self and Its Diseases”

Spring 2015

February 4

Andrew Janco, Human Rights Institute, UConn, “Archival Research Using Digital Archives”

March 4

Michael Dintenfass, History, UConn, “The Idea of Vanity”

April 1

Nancy Shoemaker, History, UConn, “History of the Extraterritorial United States to 1860”

April 15

Joy Land, UConn Stamford, “Gendered Places, Global Spaces: Women, Work, and World’s Fairs –  Evidence from the Alliance Israelite Universelle (AIU) School for Girls, City of Tunis, 1883-1893”

Fall 2014

September 17

Jane E. Schultz, IUPUI, “Sounding the Archives: A Scholar’s Professional and Personal Journey”

November 12

Ariel Lambe, History, UConn, “For a New Cuba and a New Spain: Popular Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War”

November 12

Casey Green, History, UConn, “Manhood in Crisis: Disability and Masculinity, 1750-1820”

December 3 

Tom Scheinfeldt, Digital Media & Design, UConn, “Digital Humanities: If We Don’t Do it, THEY WILL”

Spring 2014

February 19

Allison Horrocks and Michael Limberg, History, UConn, “Extension: The Wide Reach of US Rural Education Practices”

April 9

Peter Zarrow, History, UConn, “The ‘Utopian Impulse’ in Modern Chinese Thought: Research Dilemmas”

April 16

Erin Bartram, History, UConn, “Jane Says? Writing a Woman’s Life Without her Words”

Fall 2013:

October 9

Christopher Clark, “Land, Labor, and Property Rights before the American Civil War”

November 13 ­

Eduardo Canedo, History, UConn, “The Abolition of Usury Limits, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Banks”

December 4

Frank Costigliola, History, UConn, “How Kennan Thought about Russia: Modes of Cognition and the Formation of the Cold War”