History

Matthew Rojansky will discuss the current state of the war in Ukraine and take questions from the audience.

Matthew Rojansky, the President and CEO of the U.S. Russia Foundation and a Distinguished Fellow at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, is as much a regular at Congressional briefings and on prime-time news shows as he is on the streets of Moscow, Kyiv, or Berlin. One of the country’s leading analysts of US relations with Russia, Ukraine, and the region, he has advised governments and international organizations and leads track two diplomacy on Eurasian conflicts.

Pizza Lunch with the History Department - Come have some pizza and talk with the History Department faculty about the major.

The Vermont Humanities Council and the Ilsley Library present Michael Puett, professor of Chinese history at Harvard, and journalist Christine Gross-Loh, who will speak about their new book, The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life. Hosted by the East Asian Studies program, the History Department, and the Religion Department.

This talk follows the trajectories of the survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide who remained inside Turkish borders after the signing of the 1918 Mudros Armistice (and during the Allied occupation years of Istanbul) and after the 1923 establishment of the new country as the Turkish Republic. How did the Kemalist state treat the remaining Armenians? What were Armenians’ responses to the new (but also old) Turkish regime?

Guest Lecture - Dr. Sonali Mishra, Lady Shri Ram College for Women This talk will examine the burgeoning European textile trade along India’s eastern coast during the seventeenth century. After discussing the political and economic context of the time, the talk will focus on the English East India Company’s purchase of cotton textiles at the important port of Masulipatnam. Dr. Mishra is an Adjunct Professor of History at Lady Shri Ram College for Women in New Delhi, India.

James Lyall is a graduate of Middlebury College, where he majored in art with a minor in classical studies. His law degree is from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Between college and law school, Lyall worked in Boston at the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, taught in Shanghai, China, and worked as a human rights observer in Chiapas, Mexico. Lyall joined the ACLU of Vermont in 2016 and is the 12th director in the organization’s 50-year history.

Nancy F. Cott, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University, is a leading American historian. She is the author of The Bonds of Womanhood, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, and Public Vows, a history of marriage as an institution in the United States. She is the president-elect of the Organization of American Historians. Professor Cott was the lead author in drafting the historians’ amicus brief on the history of marriage in the recent landmark Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage, Obergefell v. Hodges, submitted by the American Historical Association.

Namiko Kunimoto, Assistant Professor of Japanese Art History, Ohio State University

Jubilation! Papal Jubilees Past and Present With a joyful Papal Bull, Pope Francis declared this year a Jubilee Year of Mercy, a year of indulgence, where pilgrimage can lead to the forgiveness of sins and freedom from “every residue left by the consequences of sin.” Is this just a papal “Get Out of Purgatory Free” card? Federico Canaccini will take us back to Pope Boniface VIII’s first Papal Jubilee in 1300 and explore the context, history and meanings of such extraordinary papal promises.