History Colloquium Series

History Department Colloquia are an opportunity to preview works-in-progress by faculty and academics, engage with their ideas, and offer comments and constructive criticism in an open forum that is extraordinarily helpful to the authors as they shape their manuscripts into public-facing pieces.

A guest scholar more familiar with the specific subject matter is also invited to critique the work.

Colloquia are open to the public and welcome both in-person and "zoom" attendees.  Pieces under discussion are pre-circulated to attendees.

Fall 2023 Colloquium Committee members are: Prasenjit Duara, Dirk Bonker, Pete Sigal, and graduate student Ting‐YU Cai.

Upcoming Colloquia

There are no upcoming colloquia at this time.

Past Colloquia

Derek Peterson: The Politics of Intelligence in Milton Obote's Uganda
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229 Carr Building

Derek R. Peterson teaches African history at the University of Michigan. He is the editor (with Kodzo Gavua and Ciraj Rassool) of "The Politics of Heritage in Africa" (2015), and author of "Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival" (2012), which won the Herskovits Prize (of the African… read more »

Laura Edwards: Only the Clothes on Her Back: Women, Textiles, and National Development in Nineteenth-Century United States
Laura Edwards: Only the Clothes on Her Back: Women, Textiles, and National Development in Nineteenth-Century United States
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229 Carr Building

Laura F. Edwards received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and is now the Peabody Family Professor of History at Duke University.  She works on the nineteenth-century United States with a focus on law, gender, and race.  Her most recent book A Legal History of… read more »

Bill Schwarz: Ariel and Prosper: West Indians Listen to Britain
Bill Schwarz: Ariel and Prosper: West Indians Listen to Britain
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229 Carr Building

Paper abstract:Ariel and Prosper: West Indians Listen to Britain is a chapter from the forthcoming second volume of Memories of Empire, The Caribbean Comes to England. The paper focuses on the role of radio in the moment of decolonization and in the early moments of the postwar mass migration of… read more »

Stephanie Hassell - Territorial Identities: Slavery and Religious Landscapes in the Portuguese Empire in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century India
Stephanie Hassell - Territorial Identities: Slavery and Religious Landscapes in the Portuguese Empire in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century India
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229 Carr Building

The Special Wednesday Colloquium/Brown-Bag Seminar will take place October 21 at noon-1:30 in Carr 229.  Our presenter is Stephanie Hassell who is a postdoctoral associate in the Duke History Department.  Professor Bruce Hall will serve as a discussant. Stephanie’s paper explores the… read more »

Andrew Sartori: From Statehood to Social Theory in Early-Modern Political Economy
Andrew Sartori: From Statehood to Social Theory in Early-Modern Political Economy
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229 Carr Building

In the seventeenth century, political economy was largely a discourse of trade. Society did not generally fall within the range of epistemic objects to which political economy addressed itself as a discourse -- despite the fact that the social was receiving sophisticated thematization in… read more »

Lara Putnam - The Travels and the Terrain: Transnational Histories of Race in the Postemancipation Atlantic
Lara Putnam - The Travels and the Terrain: Transnational Histories of Race in the Postemancipation Atlantic
229 Carr Building

Lara Putnam, Professor and Chair of the History Department at the University of Pittsburgh will be speaking at our History Colloquium on Monday, September 21, 2015 in 229 Carr. The Graduate Seminar, " Digital Research, Transnational History, and the Challenge to Historical Epistemology,"  will… read more »

"The Revolutionary Black Woman" and the Black Panther Party, 1966-1975
"The Revolutionary Black Woman" and the Black Panther Party, 1966-1975
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229 Carr Building

Wednesday, April 22, 12:00-1:30, 229 Carr – Ashley Farmer, Provost Postdoctoral Fellow, History Department, Duke University “The Revolutionary Black Woman" and the Black Panther Party, 1966-1975 This is a special colloquium brown bag (for internal presenters). read more »

Requiem for a Barrio: Race, Space, and Redevelopment in Inland Southern California
Requiem for a Barrio: Race, Space, and Redevelopment in Inland Southern California
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229 Carr Building

Monday April 13 – Matthew Garcia, Arizona State University, "Requiem for a Barrio: Race, Space, and Redevelopment in Inland Southern California" read more »

Barbarism, autochthony, and the problem of race in African thought
Barbarism, autochthony, and the problem of race in African thought
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229 Carr Building

Monday March 30 – Jonathon Glassman, Northwestern University, "Barbarism, autochthony, and the problem of race in African thought" read more »

Pythons Worked: Shifting Politics of the Past and Conceptual Metaphor in East Africa, ca. 800-1200 CE
Pythons Worked: Shifting Politics of the Past and Conceptual Metaphor in East Africa, ca. 800-1200 CE
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229 Carr Building

Wednesday, February 18, noon-1:30, 229 Carr David Schoenbrun, Northwestern University/visiting professor Duke University "Pythons Worked: Shifting Politics of the Past and Conceptual Metaphor in East Africa, ca. 800-1200 CE" This is a special colloquium brownbag (for internal presenters). read more »

Everyman His Own Sacred Historian: The First Crusade and the Media Revolution of Medieval Europe
Everyman His Own Sacred Historian: The First Crusade and the Media Revolution of Medieval Europe
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229 Carr Building

Monday February 16 – Carol Symes, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, "Everyman His Own Sacred Historian: The First Crusade and the Media Revolution of Medieval Europe" read more »

Magic Marx: German Communism and the Black Radical Tradition in the Mississippi Valley
Magic Marx: German Communism and the Black Radical Tradition in the Mississippi Valley
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229 Carr Building

Monday, February 2 – Andrew Zimmerman, George Washington University, "Magic Marx: German Communism and the Black Radical Tradition in the Mississippi Valley" Download Zimmerman Flyer (pdf - 429.56 KB) read more »

The Auto Giant. Ford Motor Company and the Roots of Soviet Industrialization
The Auto Giant. Ford Motor Company and the Roots of Soviet Industrialization
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229 Carr Building

Stefan Link is Assistant Professor of Economic History at Dartmouth College. He gained his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2012. His main research interests are in the economic history of the 20th century, the intellectual history of capitalism, and American, German, and Soviet history. He is… read more »

Gatekeeping as Geopolitics: Immigration Policy and American Global Power in the Long 20th Century
Gatekeeping as Geopolitics: Immigration Policy and American Global Power in the Long 20th Century
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Carr 229

The October meeting of the History Colloquium will take place Monday, October 27, 3PM-5PM, Carr 229.  Our presenter Paul Kramer is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.  His research and teaching interests are in U. S. global histories since the mid-19th century.… read more »

Reassessing Newton's Alchemy
Reassessing Newton's Alchemy
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229 Carr Bldg

In the course of the last generation, Isaac Newton’s involvement in alchemy has passed from almost total obscurity to the state of being relatively well known.  Popular and scholarly accounts based on the scholarship of Richard Westfall and Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs assert that Newton’s alchemy… read more »

Displacement, Place, and the Experience of the Long War in China and Taiwan, 1937-1959
Displacement, Place, and the Experience of the Long War in China and Taiwan, 1937-1959
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229 Carr Bldg

Rebecca Nedostup is Associate Professor of History at Brown University, and a Shelby Cullom Davis Fellow at Princeton University for 2014-15. She will also hold a joint History/APSI/CAH graduate seminar to discuss her collaborative project "The Social Lives of Dead Bodies in Modern China" and… read more »