History

Steve Barnes is Associate Professor of History at George Mason University. His lecture will examine the politics surrounding commemoration of the Gulag prison system in contemporary Russia and Kazakhstan. Each country sports an authoritarian government and engages in significant mythmaking about the history of Soviet repression. Those myths differ in key ways but the Gulag past is used in both cases to justify the current political system.

John Patrick Leary, Associate Professor of English at Wayne State University, will speak about his latest book, “Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism” (Haymarket Press, December 2018). “Keywords” chronicles the rise of a new vocabulary. From Silicon Valley to the White House, from kindergarten to college, and from the factory floor to the church pulpit, we are now called to be innovators and entrepreneurs. In the midst of increasing inequality, such keywords apply the lessons of a competitive marketplace to every sphere of life.

The Axinn Center for the Humanities presents its inaugural lecture by Emily Bernard: “Black is the Body: Writing about Race in America”

Racial identity is a construction. But just because it is a fiction does not make it untrue. In this talk, Emily Bernard  discusses the complex and central role of storytelling as a source of power, meaning, and beauty in her life as a writer, reader, and scholar of African American experience.

 

A talk by Dr. Nicola Di Cosmo, Luce Foundation Professor in East Asian Studies at the Institute of Advanced Study
In Chinese history, borderlands have often been politically contested. But frontiers have also been places of cultural encounters, transmission, and negotiation. This talk explores the material remains of these contacts from the “other side” of the Great Wall, and argues for a new interpretation of the Chinese impact on the borderlands, the cultural contacts that took place, and their long-term consequences.

In this 70th year of the existence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Middlebury College and the Burlington Chapter of the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom are partnering to bring Professor Blanche Wiesen Cook to campus to lecture on the role that Eleanor Roosevelt, former First Lady and global activist, played in the creation of this important UN declaration.  Cook is an award-winning biographer of Roosevelt; her lecture will provide details about Roosevelt’s life and humanitarian work after her time in the White House and will also consider the broader mea

Department of History Senior Reception

The Department of History cordially invites all history majors and their guests to join us for our Senior Reception. Light refreshments will be served. History prizes will be awarded at 5:15

Charles S. Grant Memorial Lecture

Margaret MacMillan, one of the most well-known historians of our time, will deliver the next Charles S. Grant Memorial Lecture. Professor MacMillan teaches at the University of Toronto, and she is the emeritus Professor of International History and former Warden of St.

A two-day symposium to kickoff the DLA project Atlantic World Forum: Reimagining the Online Scholarly Roundtable, Reshaping the Global Digital Humanities, Reframing Circum-Atlantic Cultural Histories.

Find all of the symposium schedule here: http://awf.middcreate.net/category/program-schedule/

The Departments of German, French, Russian, History, Political Science and the Programs in American Studies and International Studies/ European Studies invite students and faculty/ staff to join us for a special theme party, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and all it stands for!