Events

Writing museum labels or web content for a public audience requires a mastery of the ideas that permit the author to be both brief and dense, specific but jargon free. So what about teaching students to do it? What does it look like to teach students to communicate complex topics in art and science to a broad public audience? In this panel discussion Mead Art Museum’s Head of Education Emily Potter-Ndiaye will moderate a conversation with Professors Chris Durr (Chemistry) and Dwight Carey (Architectural Studies and Art History) to hear more about their recent student projects in public facing writing and the pedagogies that support it. What does this look like for topics that normally require a deep base of background knowledge? What is specific to the discipline, universal across the curriculum? Where did their best efforts fall flat? And what do they take from the process as educators and scholars? Participants are welcome and encouraged to come with notes from their own practice to add to the discussion.

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Presenter: Richard Adams Carey

On August 19, 1997, in little Colebrook, New Hampshire, a 62-year-old carpenter named Carl Drega, a man with long-simmering property rights grievances, murdered state troopers Scott Phillips and Les Lord at a traffic stop in a supermarket parking lot. Then Drega stole Phillips's cruiser and drove downtown to settle some old scores. By the end of the day three more were dead, Drega among them, and four wounded. Occurring on the eve of America's current plague of gun violence, this tragic event made headlines all over the world and shocked New Hampshire out of a previous innocence. Touching on facets of North Country history, local governance, law enforcement, gun violence, and the human spirit, Richard Adams Carey describes a community that was never a passive victim but rather a brave and resilient survivor.  

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Presenter: Mary Kelly

Drawing on material from her book Ireland's Great Famine in Irish-American History, Dr. Kelly will discuss the role of the Famine in shaping Irish-American ethnic identity. Focusing on the long-term impact of the episode between the 1840s and 1990s, she explores the shadowed landscape of Famine legacy and its status in Irish-American culture today. Referencing contemporary press accounts and the writings of Famine survivors and their descendants, Dr. Kelly shows how interrogating Famine memory enables the Irish on both sides of the Atlantic to deal with the material and emotional inheritance of this tragic experience. 

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Presenter: Jason Sokol

From Brooklyn to Boston, from World War II to the present, Jason Sokol traces the modern history of race and politics in the Northeast. Why did white fans come out to support Jackie Robinson as he broke baseball's color barrier in 1947 even as Brooklyn's blacks were shunted into segregated neighborhoods? How was African-American politician Ed Brooke of Massachusetts, who won a Senate seat in 1966, undone by the resistance to desegregation busing in Boston? Is the Northeast's history a microcosm of America as a whole: outwardly democratic, but inwardly conflicted over race? Registration information will be posted soon. 

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Presenter: Liz Tentarelli

The campaign for women's right to vote was a long one, from the 1848 Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York to ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920. Who were the key players in New Hampshire and the nation? What issues and obstacles did they face? How did suffragists benefit from World War I in the final push for passage of the women's suffrage amendment? Who was left out when women got the right to vote? Using historic photos and documents, Liz Tentarelli will guide us on the journey. Liz is president of the League of Women Voters NH, a non-partisan organization that is the direct descendant of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. 

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Presenter: Jo Radner

Whatever did New Englanders do on long winter evenings before cable, satellite and the internet? In the decades before and after the Civil War, our rural ancestors used to create neighborhood events to improve their minds. Community members male and female would compose and read aloud homegrown, handwritten literary "newspapers" full of keen verbal wit. Sometimes serious, sometimes sentimental but mostly very funny, these "newspapers" were common in villages across Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont and revealed the hopes, fears, humor and surprisingly daring behavior of our forebears. Jo Radner shares excerpts from her forthcoming book about hundreds of these "newspapers" and provides examples from villages in your region.

To register, email friendsbmlibrary@gmail.com.

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Editors from Amherst College Press, Cornell University Press, and New York University Press will present on key aspects of the book publishing process in order to give faculty the best opportunities to successfully publish their manuscripts in ways that they find fulfilling. This is designed for first-time and seasoned authors. Much time will be devoted to answering your questions.

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Presenter: Jordan Tirrell-Wysocki

Through traditional music Jordan Tirrell-Wysocki relays some of the adventures, misadventures, and emotions experienced by Irish emigrants. The focus is on songs about leaving Ireland, sometimes focusing on the reasons for leaving (a man who is driven from his land by English persecution), sometimes revealing what happened upon arrival (an immigrant drafted into the Union army during the Civil War), and sometimes exploring the universal feeling of homesickness of a stranger in a strange land (a factory worker in London missing his home in County Clare). The presenter discusses the historical context of these songs, interspersing their stories with tunes from Ireland that made their way into New England's musical repertoire, played on his fiddle or guitar. 

Please email: library@frostfree.org or call the library with questions 603 876 4479.

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Presenter: Kate Gaudet

Dr. Katherine Gaudet (UNH) explores stories of epidemics in our next HTG Online event. Are we living through a Biblical plague? Or are we feeling the wrath of the gods on our society, like Thebes in the time of Oedipus? This talk considers what stories, histories, and legends of epidemics have to tell us about how to understand our own time.

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Presenter: Richard Hesse

In 1787 delegates gathered in Philadelphia to address a wide variety of crises facing the young United States of America and produced a charter for a new government. In modern times, competing political and legal claims are frequently based on what those delegates intended. Mythology about the founders and their work at the 1787 Convention has obscured both fact and legitimate analysis of the events leading to the agreement called the Constitution. Richard Hesse explores the cast of characters called "founders," the problems they faced, and the solutions they fashioned.

Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89798972388?pwd=QXl3aFJLcVgxSzNYbkFnM1N3N3pXQT09 Meeting ID: 897 9897 2388 Passcode: 852559

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For Black Americans traveling in the era of segregation presented serious dangers from hotels and restaurants that refused to accommodate them to hostile “sundown towns,” where posted signs warned people of color that they were banned after nightfall. Out of necessity, Black travelers would flock to towns like Oak Bluffs where they would be welcomed. Initially established by freed slaves who sought shelter there after slavery was abolished. Then, in the 1930s and 1940s, as African Americans in urban centers like New York, Washington, D.C. and Boston began to establish themselves as part of the middle and upper-middle class, they flocked to the East Coast shoreline in summer to take in the beach and the bonfires.

For this conversation, panelists will share the history and personal stories of the growth of the Black Elite on the Vineyard and how this upwardly mobile Black community recast the borders of white spaces.

Panelists:
Gretchen Sorin, author, Driving While Black;  African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights; Joanne Dowdell, Senior Vice President Global Government Affairs at News Corp; Loren Van Allen, member of the Shearer Family, owners of Shearer Cottage.

Moderator: Bithiah Carter, President & CEO, New England Blacks in Philanthropy 

The winter Tea Talk series, presented by the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire (BHTNH) and sponsored in part by a grant from New Hampshire Humanities, is a series of participatory lectures related to New Hampshire’s Black history and African American culture. These events are free and open to the public. For more information, visit www.blackheritagetrailnh.org/tea-talks.

Register

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Presenter: Liz Tentarelli

The campaign for women's right to vote was a long one, from the 1848 Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York to ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920. Who were the key players in New Hampshire and the nation? What issues and obstacles did they face? How did suffragists benefit from World War I in the final push for passage of the women's suffrage amendment? Who was left out when women got the right to vote? Using historic photos and documents, Liz Tentarelli will guide us on the journey. Liz is president of the League of Women Voters NH, a non-partisan organization that is the direct descendant of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. 

REGISTER

Link to event page.

Presenter: Jo Radner  

Whatever did New Englanders do on long winter evenings before cable, satellite and the internet? In the decades before and after the Civil War, our rural ancestors used to create neighborhood events to improve their minds. Community members male and female would compose and read aloud homegrown, handwritten literary "newspapers" full of keen verbal wit. Sometimes serious, sometimes sentimental but mostly very funny, these "newspapers" were common in villages across Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont and revealed the hopes, fears, humor and surprisingly daring behavior of our forebears. Jo Radner shares excerpts from her forthcoming book about hundreds of these "newspapers" and provides examples from villages in your region.  

REGISTER

Link to event page.

The intention of this presentation is to discuss the teleological and ethical dimension of our judgment upon our judgment, literally an “auto-meta-judgment”, a moment of thought in which we evaluate our own thinking according to both ethical and logical considerations. The aim of this paper is to determine the characteristics of such an act of self-awareness and to demonstrate how, despite many possible levels of self-reflection, we can avoid an infinite regress and come to a level of derivative reflection where the entire corpus of transcendental statements would be reduced to goodness and logical correctness.

If, then, thinking one right is not only common but epistemologically inevitable, only a dedicated and paradoxical ethical approach stemming from compassion and a sense of human fellowship can take us past the threshold of openness to others’ ideas and views. In a time of political fragmentation and tension, however, we must question whether we even want to do so in the first place.

Drawing from philosophical tradition ranging from Aristotle to Merleau-Ponty in the first part and pivoting towards more mundane yet crucial political debates in the second, we will try to ask ourselves: how can I talk to someone who holds different ideas from mine, without renouncing my critical thinking? Can I overcome the innate and inevitable notion that I am always right in thinking what I think?

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This salon features a presentation by five students selected this past fall as Folger Undergraduate Fellows. The Fellows took part in an intensive seminar during January-term to work in close collaboration with Folger staff and with a group of postdoctoral researchers to engage in a 360-degree investigation of an 18th-century manuscript recipe book from the Folger Shakespeare Library collection. Students examined how the book was put together; investigated its users, contributors, and sources; identified seasonal ingredients, preservation methods, and ingredients made available through trade routes and institutionalized slavery. They transcribed, edited, and adapted recipes, uncovered implicit knowledge and hidden labor encoded in the recipes, and even recreated selected recipes. Student presenters: Sarah Edelson '23, Hildi Gabel '21, Maddie Hahm '23, Kate Lester '22, and Anna Smith '22. Folger Shakespeare Library staff: Dr. Heather Wolfe, Curator of Manuscripts; Dr. Amanda Herbert, Associate Director of Fellowships.

The Folger Shakespeare Library is one of the world’s premier research libraries. Its founder, Henry Clay Folger, graduated from Amherst in 1879 and bequeathed the Library to Amherst upon his death in 1930.

ZOOM REGISTRATION

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Presenter: Jordan Tirrell-Wysocki  

Through traditional music Jordan Tirrell-Wysocki relays some of the adventures, misadventures, and emotions experienced by Irish emigrants. The focus is on songs about leaving Ireland, sometimes focusing on the reasons for leaving (a man who is driven from his land by English persecution), sometimes revealing what happened upon arrival (an immigrant drafted into the Union army during the Civil War), and sometimes exploring the universal feeling of homesickness of a stranger in a strange land (a factory worker in London missing his home in County Clare). The presenter discusses the historical context of these songs, interspersing their stories with tunes from Ireland that made their way into New England's musical repertoire, played on his fiddle or guitar.  

REGISTER

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Former director of the Walters Art Museum, Mr. Vikan will be talking about his recent book, The Holy Shroud: A Brilliant Hoax in the Time of the Black Death (Pegasus Books, 2020) in which he shows that the world’s most controversial relic, the Shroud of Turin is not the burial cloth of Jesus, but rather a photograph-like body print of a medieval Frenchman created by a brilliant artist serving the royal court in the time of the Black Death. While other scholars, and even the Catholic Church itself, have never confirmed the authenticity of the Shroud, the question always remained—how did that image get there? Combining copious research and decades of art world experience with an accessible, wry voice, Gary Vikan shows how one of the greatest hoaxes in the history of Christian relics came into being.

The talk is sponsored by the Art Department, the Center for the Arts and Humanities, the Colby College Museum of Art, and the Department of Religious Studies.

Meeting ID: 981 9433 4633; click here to join.

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Presenter: Marina Forbes

This illustrated presentation by Marina Forbes focuses on the life and remarkable work of Russian master jeweler and artist, Peter Carl Fabergé. The program features a photo-tour of Fabergé collections at the Constantine Palace in St. Petersburg and from major museums and private collectors around the world. Explore the important role of egg painting in Russian culture and the development of this major Russian art form from a traditional craft to the level of exquisite fine art under the patronage of the tsars. Forbes also discusses the fascinating history of these eggs, their role in the dramatic events of the last decades of Romanov rule in Russia, and in the years following the Bolshevik Revolution.

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Hidden drives are invisible driveways to dwellings also unseen. Rarely pursued by passerby, hidden drives are passages to homes that remain obscure, to residents whose histories are so too unknown. Hidden drives can also be invisible because they are internal. Repressed desires, inculcated ideas, secret aspirations: these hidden drives influence how we navigate our world, how we see ourselves, how we stage our story. Hidden Drives: The Scene and Unseen of Home explores why certain stories of home are shared while others are concealed, and how this comes to be. Through this virtual exhibit, visitors will be able to listen to the silences and observe the erasures that shape our understandings of home. Hidden Drives seeks to help visitors recognize the blind spots in their own worldview.

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Laura Wides-Muñoz is a journalist and author. She currently serves as an Executive Editor for News Practices at ABC News in Washington DC. Her debut book, “The Making of a Dream: How a Group of Young Undocumented Immigrants Helped Change What it Means to be American” (Harper Books: 2018), was named a semifinalist for the 2018 PEN America/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for nonfiction literature. Previously, she was based in Miami as VP for Special Projects at Fusion Network, overseeing work by the investigative and digital teams. Laura began her career covering the end of the civil war in Guatemala and has reported throughout Central America and Cuba. She worked for more than a decade at The Associated Press and was a 2013 Nieman Foundation for Journalism fellow at Harvard University. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, The Guardian, and the Los Angeles Times, among other outlets.

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Presenter: Jeff Warner  
Drawing heavily on the repertoire of traditional singer Lena Bourne Fish (1873-1945) of Jaffrey and Temple, New Hampshire, Jeff Warner offers the songs and stories that, in the words of Carl Sandburg, tell us "where we came from and what brought us along." These ballads, love songs and comic pieces, reveal the experiences and emotions of daily life in the days before movies, sound recordings and, for some, books. Songs from the lumber camps, the decks of sailing ships, the textile mills, and the war between the sexes offer views of pre-industrial New England and a chance to hear living artifacts from the 18th and 19th centuries.  

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Presenter: Bob Cottrell  
This program looks at how dog sledding developed in New Hampshire and how the Chinook played a major role in this story. Explaining how man and his relationship with dogs won out over machines on several famous polar expeditions, Bob Cottrell covers the history of Arthur Walden and his Chinooks, the State Dog of New Hampshire.  

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Live from the Field: History and Humanities PhDs in University Administration

Featuring

Ferentz LaFargue, Dean of the College, Saybrook College, Yale University

Laura Perille, Associate Director, Office of Fellowships, Awards, and Resources, Georgetown University

Joel Revill, Senior Associate Dean of the Faculty and Adjunct Assistant Professor of History, Brown University

To register for the above event, click here.

What is the What History Looks Like series?

Established in 2016, the Brown History Department’s What History Looks Like series continues for its fifth consecutive year with the same enduring purpose: to foster a space where Brown History Department faculty, students, and historians in other departments can share the versatility of their skills and experiences, and learn more about the diverse settings where historical work takes place.

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Computational methods can help the humanities by making massive cultural heritage collections more explorable and analyzable. Machine learning and statistical methods provide an opportunity to view collections from alien, defamiliarized perspectives that can call into question the boundaries between established categories. But the converse is also true; the humanities have much to offer machine learning. The use of computational methods within humanities scholarship often tests and expands the affordances of these methods. The complexities and idiosyncrasies of humanities collections can improve our understanding of what models learn and how we might direct what they learn.
In this talk, Laure Thompson will discuss how machine learning and the humanities help each other. She will demonstrate how convolutional neural networks can be used as an exploratory tool to ask "What is Dada?" Then, she will show how science fiction novels highlight the way topic models tend to learn author- and series-oriented discourses, and how they have inspired a method for directing these models towards more cross-cutting themes. Finally, Thompson will briefly describe how these two lines of work are being combined to enable the study of magical gems, an art historic category of engraved gemstones from the Greco-Roman world.

Laure Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information & Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst. This talk will be introduced and facilitated by Lee Spector, Visiting Professor of Computer Science.

Co-sponsored and funded by the Artificial Intelligence in the Liberal Arts Initiative.

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