NICHOLAS D. CHABRAJA CENTER FOR HISTORICAL STUDIES

Lectures and other events

 2024-2025 major events

Unless otherwise stated, CCHS events are FREE and OPEN to the PUBLIC and take place in HARRIS HALL 108 (Leopold Room), 1881 Sheridan Rd., Evanston campus.  For LUNCH LECTURES, a catered lunch starts at noon, the lecture about 12:30 p.m.

FALL 2024

Annual ICE CREAM LECTURE

Melissa MACAULEY (Northwestern University), author of Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China’s Maritime Frontier (2021)—Thursday, September 26, 2023—LUNCH LECTURE: “The Politics of Commemoration in Post-Mao China”

Wolf GRUNER (University of Southern California), author of Resisters. How Ordinary Jews fought Persecution in Hitler’s Germany (2023)—Tuesday, October 1 at 5 p.m. (reception to follow): “Resisters. How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler's Germany”

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Kyle HARPER (University of Oklahoma), author of Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History (2021)—Tuesday, October 8 LUNCH LECTURE on “History and the Sciences, History as Science”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Talitha LeFLOURIA (University of Texas at Austin), author of Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (2015)—Tuesday, November 19 LUNCH LECTURE: "Overpunished, Overpoliced, and Unprotected: A 150-year Exploration of Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America"

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WINTER 2025

Michelle McKINLEY (University of Oregon), author of Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700 (2016).—Thursday, February 20, 2025 LUNCH LECTURE on "Financing Freedom: Self-purchase and Re-enslavement in the Seventeeth-Century Empire"

Robin D. G. KELLEY (UCLA), author of Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (2012)—February 27 at 4 p.m. (reception to follow): “The Responsibility of Black Studies in the Face of Genocide and Fascism”

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SPRING 2025

Faculty CONFERENCE convened by Professors Jonathan BRACK, Sean HANRETTA, and Akinwumi OGUNDIRAN on “Caring for the Dead: Ancestor Veneration, Religious Encounters, and the State in the Mongol Empire and Africa”—Friday and Saturday, April 4-5

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Serhii PLOKHII (Harvard), author of The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015) and The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (2015)—Thursday, April 10 LUNCH LECTURE

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Gray Boyce Memorial Lecture in Medieval History (CCHS/History)

Jamie KREINER (UCLA), author of The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction (2023)—Thursday, April 24 at 4:30 p.m. (reception to follow): “How to Deal with Distraction: Early Medieval Monks and the Modern Quest for Cognitive History”

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Faculty CONFERENCE convened by Professor Susan PEARSON on “Paper People: Documentation, Identity, and Citizenship in U.S. History”—Friday and Saturday, May 2-3.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Matthew SOMMER (Stanford University), author of The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (2024)—Thursday, May 8 LUNCH LECTURE

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------History of the Book Lecture (CCHS/University Libraries)

Corinna ZELTSMAN (Princeton), author of Ink Under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (2021)—Wednesday, May 14 at 4:30 p.m. (reception to follow): “Mexico’s Workers of Thought: Rethinking Political Culture & Press Freedom through Printing”

2023-24 major events

FALL 2023

• ICE CREAM LECTURE
  Daniel IMMERWAHR
  (Northwestern University), author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (2019)—Tuesday, September 26, 2023—LUNCH LECTURE
  “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Guano but Were Afraid to Ask”

• Judith BYFIELD
  (Cornell University), author of The Great Upheaval: Women and Nation in Postwar Nigeria (2022)—Thursday, October 12 LUNCH LECTURE: "Serendipity and the Historian's Craft"

• In collaboration with the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern (HEFNU)
  Valerie HEBERT (Lakehead University), author of Hitler’s Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg (2010)—Wednesday, October 18 at 5 p.m. (reception to follow):
  “Remnants of Light: Holocaust Photographs in History and Memory”

• Ruth ROGASKI (Vanderbilt University), author of Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland (2022)—Thursday, November 2 LUNCH LECTURE: “Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland”

WINTER 2024

•  Stefan J. LINK (Dartmouth College), author of Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order (2020)—Thursday, February 8, 2024 LUNCH LECTURE: "Towards a Global History of the Great Depression"

• Joint CCHS/CAAH Distinguished lecture on Black History
  Kris MANJAPRA (Northwestern University), author of Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation (2022)—Thursday, February 29 at 4 p.m. (reception to follow):
  "Trickster Remakes the World: Ancestrality and the Trouble of Africana 'Human Remains' Collections"

SPRING 2024

• History of the Book Lecture (CCHS/University Libraries)
  Ann BLAIR (Harvard), co-author with Anthony Grafton of Information: A Historical Companion (2021)—Tuesday, March 26 at 4:30 p.m. (reception to follow): “Amanuenses and the productions of texts in the Renaissance”

• CANCELED: Ira KATZNELSON (Columbia University), author of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origin of Our Time (2013) and co-author of Time Counts: Quantitative Methods for Historical Social Science (2022)—Thursday, April 11 LUNCH LECTURE—canceled due to unforseen circumstances 

• Craig KOSLOFSKY (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), co-author of Stigma: Marking Skin in the Early Modern World (2023)—Tuesday, May 7 LUNCH LECTURE: “Fanon’s ‘Shameful Livery’: Toward a Dialogue between Early Modern Studies and Afropessimism”

Faculty 2024 faculty conference

• Thursday, May 9 at 4 p.m. Conference keynote conversation
• Friday, May 10—all-day faculty CONFERENCE on "The Stories in Our Histories: Historians Confront Themselves” (convened by Prof. Leslie HARRIS)

• Gray Boyce Memorial Lecture in Medieval History (CCHS/History)
  Kristina RICHARDSON (UVA), author of Roma in the Medieval Islamic Word: Literacy, Culture and Migration (2022)—Thursday, May 23 at 4:30 p.m. (reception to follow)
  “Book History from the Margins: What Gutenberg Owed to Medieval Itinerant Printers”

2022-23

FALL 2022

• For the History Department and invited guests: CENTER BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION
  Henry BINFORD (Northwestern University emeritus), author of From Improvement to City Planning: Spatial Management in Cincinnati from the Early Republic through the Civil War Decade (2021)—Tuesday, October 4 LUNCH LECTURE
  “The Social, Cultural, and Economic Significance of Ice Cream"

• In collaboration with the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern (HEFNU) HYBRID EVENT
  Avinoam J. PATT (University of Connecticut), author of The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt (2021)—Thursday, October 20 at 7:30 p.m. (reception to follow)
   “Ghetto in Flames: The Memory and Meaning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”
  Registration required for both in-person attendance and webinar

• Camilla TOWNSEND (Rutgers University), author of Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (2019)—Thursday, November 3 LUNCH LECTURE
  "Rethinking the Aztecs: Have we been wrong for 500 years?"

WINTER 2023

• Louise YOUNG (University of Wisconsin—Madison), author of Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan (2013)—Thursday, February 9 LUNCH LECTURE
  “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Changing Sightlines on the Japanese Empire”

• CANCELED! Joint CCHS/CAAH Distinguished lecture on African American History
  Tomiko BROWN-NAGIN (Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University), author of Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality (2022)—Thursday, March 2 at 5 p.m.
  “Civil Rights Queen: A Conversation with Tomiko Brown-Nagin”—CANCELED

SPRING 2023

• Charles POSTEL (San Francisco State University), author of the award-winning book The Populist Vision (2007)—Tuesday, April 11 LUNCH LECTURE
  “Pearl Harbor Blues—The Black Experience in the World War II Era”

• Gray Boyce Memorial Lecture in Medieval History:
  Dyan ELLIOTT (Northwestern University), author of The Corrupter of Boys: Sodomy, Scandal, and the Medieval Clergy (2020))—Thursday, April 20 at 4:30 p.m. (reception to follow)  
  "Digging up Dirt: Exhumation in the Middle Ages"

• Joint CCHS/University Libraries Lecture on the History of the Book:
  Derrick R. SPIRES (Cornell University), author of The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (2019)—Tuesday, April 25 at 4:30 p.m. (reception to follow)
  "Reading William Still’s Underground Rail Road: Black Bibliography and the History of the Book Now”

• Emily GREBLE (Vanderbilt University), author of Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe (2021)—Thursday, May 4 LUNCH LECTURE
  “Equality before whose law? Peasant wives, angry monks, and runaway slaves in the Ottoman-European borderlands”

• All-day Friday June 2 graduate conference on
  “Commercial Networks: Connections, Conflicts, Exchanges”

2021-2022

Unless otherwise stated, CCHS events are FREE, open to the PUBLIC, and take place in HARRIS HALL 108 (the Leopold Room), 1881 Sheridan Rd., Evanston campus. For lunch lectures, light catered lunch starts at 12 noon, the lecture about 12:30 p.m. We LIVESTREAM (via ZOOM)  the lectures for those who cannot attend in person. If you wish to watch the livestream, please register at https://planitpurple.northwestern.edu/.

FALL 2021

• In collaboration with the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern (HEFNU)~For invited guests and members of Northwestern University only~due to health concerns there will be no reception.
  Danielle CHRISTMAS (University of North Carolina), working on “Auschwitz and the Plantation: Labor, Sex, and Death in American Holocaust and Slavery Fiction”—Thursday, October 28 at 7:30 p.m. 
  Lecture: “From Africa to Auschwitz: Storytelling Hitler’s Antebellum Europe”

• Bianca PREMO (Florida International University), author of The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (2017)—Thursday, November 4 lunch lecture (12:15 to 1:50 p.m.)
  Lecture: “Write to Refusal: Careful Approaches to the History of Peru’s Five-Year Old Mother”

• David CHANG (University of Minnesota), author of The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (2016)—Thursday, November 18 lunch lecture (12:15 to 1:50 p.m.)
  Lecture: "Love, Death, and Rivers: Native Californians and Native Hawaiians Remember the Making of a New People”

• Joint CCHS/CAAH Distinguished lecture on African American History
  Martha JONES (Johns Hopkins University), author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020) and Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018)—Monday, February 28 at 5 p.m.
  “Thick Women and the Thin Nineteenth Amendment”

• Marcy NORTON (University of Pennsylvania), author of Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (2008)—Tuesday, March 1 lunch lecture (12:15 to 1:50 p.m.)
   “Animal Subjects: Modes of Interaction in Greater Amazonia after 1492”

SPRING 2022

We LIVESTREAM (via ZOOM)  the lectures for those who cannot attend in person.

• Elizabeth HINTON (Yale University), author of the award-winning From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (2016)—Thursday, April 7 VIRTUAL lecture (12:30 to 2 p.m.) VIRTUAL Lecture—registration link:
  "The Fire This Time: Police Violence and Urban Uprising from the 1960s to George Floyd"

• Keynote lecture for the graduate conference on “The Prison and Systems of Punishment”
  Clare ANDERSON (University of Leicester, UK), author of Convicts: A Global History (2022)
  Friday, April 8 at 1 p.m. (with boxed lunches available at 12:30 p.m.)
   “Convicts: A Global History”

• Gray Boyce Memorial Lecture in Medieval History
  Fiona GRIFFITHS (Stanford University), author of Nuns' Priests' Tales Men and Salvation in Medieval Women's Monastic Life (2018)—Thursday, April 21 at 4:30 p.m. (reception to follow)
  "Priestly Husbands and Fathers in the Eleventh Century"

• Keynote lecture for the graduate conference on “When They Became Pests: Human and Nonhuman Species as Vermin in History”
  Susan JONES (University of Minnesota), author of Death in a Small Package: A Short History of Anthrax (2010)—Friday, April 29 at 1 p.m. (with boxed lunches available at 12:30 p.m.)
  “Becoming and Unbecoming Pests: New Approaches to Marginalized Beings”

• Angela ZIMMERMAN (George Washington University), author of Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (2010)
  Thursday, May 5 lunch lecture at 12:30 p.m. (with boxed lunches available at 12 noon)
  “Decolonizing the Civil War, Retelling the Central Event of United States History”

• Joint CCHS/University Libraries Lecture on the History of the Book
  Stephanie NEWELL (Yale University), author of Histories of Dirt in West Africa: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos (2020)
  Thursday, May 12 at 4:30 p.m. (reception to follow)
  “Ephemeral Texts and Local Creativity in Colonial Nigeria”