Upcoming Events

12:00 - 1:30 PM

207 UB Commons
UB North Campus

Professor and Chair of the Department of History, Erik Seeman, will be giving a talk as part of UB's Gender Institute's Feminist Research Alliance Workshop. In this talk, Seeman will discuss his new book, Speaking with the Dead in Early America, which traces the history of Protestant communication with the dead from the English Reformation to the rise of Spiritualism. Before they dominated Spiritualism, women were central to what Seeman calls the antebellum cult of the dead. Women did the physical labor of caring for the dying and dead, and the emotional labor of grief work. They authored and read the popular sentimental literature that transmitted the cult. And in their diaries they prayed to the dead and expressed the belief that the dead returned as guardian angels. Women thus generated theological change, contrary to how previous scholars privilege male theologians and revivalists.

1:00 - 2:30 PM

551 Park Hall
UB North Campus

Are you interested in working in such fields as museum education, K-12 teaching, or higher education? Would you like to hear about general job possibilities inside and outside of academia? Bring your resume, job interview questions, or general inquiries to the experts! UB History alumni and the American Historical Association’s Director of Academic and Professional Affairs are looking forward to answering your questions.

Sign-up available in 551 Park Hall

3:30 - 5:30 PM

148 Diefedorf Hall
UB South Campus

This roundtable consists of MA and PhD alumni from the UB Department of History whose careers represent a wide array of teaching professions both inside and outside of academia. The panel members will answer questions about their graduate school life, their current and past positions, and how to navigate the job market with a graduate degree in history. There will be an open Q&A session, so please come with your questions ready!

Emily Swafford, Director of Academic and Professional Affairs at the American Historical Association will open the roundtable to speak about the AHA Career Diversity Initiative. The discussion will end at 5:00 p.m. and will be followed by a reception.

12:00 - 2:00 PM

280 Park Hall
UB North Campus

The UB Center for Disability Studies will host Laurel Daen, PhD and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Omohundunro Institute at the College of William and Mary. Dr. Daen will present "Legally Disabled" in Early America. She is currntly writing a book about the medicalization and bureacratization of disability in ealry North America.

3:00 - 5:00 PM

532 Park Hall
UB North Campus

Dr. Sarah Handley-Cousins will introduce her new book: Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North, followed by comments and context from Dr. Stephen Berry of the University of Georgia.

Greiner Hall, Ground Level
UB North Campus

The Department of History is cosponsoring the 13th IEMA Visiting Scholar Conference. This conference will have its main focus on this period: the ‘long’ Late Antiquity represents the perfect place and time to discuss transcultural processes, social mediations, and political and ethnical varieties. Examples of encounters between cultures in some European territories and the Mediterranean will be presented; scholars will reflect on the meaning of the term ‘cultures’, and to what extent these can be traced through the different sources. The role of the study of historical transcultural encounters in our contemporary society will also be discussed.

The conference will provide an opportunity to reconsider and reinvigorate the debate on central themes, such as the end of the Roman Empire, the processes of ethnogenesis, the construction and negotiation of identities, and the contacts between the communities that populated Europe and the Mediterranean. Moreover, it will offer a multidisciplinary and comparative perspective, crossing chronological and geographical boundaries between specialisms, with the ultimate aim of deepening our understanding of the complexity of transcultural encounters in the ‘long’ Late Antiquity.

1:00 - 3:00 PM

280 Park Hall
UB Cmapus North

The UB Center for Disability Studies welcomes Professor Warren Rosenblum of Webster University. His presentation describes the remarkable growth of institutions for the feeble-minded in Central Europe from the 1880s to the 1910s and the importance of this landscape of care and confinement to the program of mass killing of persons with disabilities under the Nazis. In the period before World War I, reformers believed that families, public schools, and communities were incapable of accommodating persons with diminished capacities to think, work, and maintain a disciplined and orderly lifestyle. Asylums were expected both to transform the curable and provide a sanctuary for the incurable, preventing hopeless cases from clogging the machinery of modern reform. The Nazis radicalized this project by appropriating the rhetoric of transformation, while denouncing the “palaces of care” which, at great cost, warehoused persons with no prospects of improvement. The so-called “euthanasia program” was principally an effort to purge the asylums of severe cases in order to focus resources on the building of perfect communities liberated from disability.