Upcoming Events

Date: Friday October 23, 2020
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: Virtual - Scholars@Hallwalls is managing the registration process.

Title: Globes and the Global Imagination in Early America: Objects, Ideas, and People

We live in an age of global communities and economies, but when and how did Americans begin to think globally? Thornton turns to globes themselves, exploring a long-lost world when globes were rare, came in celestial and terrestrial pairs, and were used not as spherical maps, but to calculate how the experience of seasons, sunlight and darkness, and the night sky varies around the globe. Well into the 1800s, globes offered distinctive modes of imagining other places, with implications for thinking about and engaging with distant peoples. ​

Date: Friday, November 6, 2020
Time: 2:00 - 4:00 PM
Location: Zoom link to come soon

Dr. Holden will speak about her forthcoming book, Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community. In it, she focuses on the community that produced the Southampton Rebellion. Led by Nat Turner in August of 1831, nearly fifty enslaved and free African Americans traveled throughout Southampton County, Virginia, and murdered almost sixty white men, women, and children in what remains America’s most famous slave rebellion. Dr. Holden’s scholarship centers free and enslaved Black women’s experiences and actions before and during the rebellion.  Her work demonstrates the importance of long-standing networks of resistance in the success of the Southampton Rebellion. In her talk, Dr. Holden will focus on how Black women navigated the aftermath of the rebellion and implemented strategies of survival that sustained their communities in the face of escalating white violence and harrowing loss.

Date: Thursday, November 12, 2020 
Time: 2:30 - 4:00 PM
Location: REGISTER HERE

Keynote Speaker: Samuel K. Roberts, Associate Professor of History and African-American Studies (Columbia University School of Arts & Sciences) and Associate Professor of Sociomedical Sciences (Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health)

The Keynote address for a new series on Race, Health, and Science

Presented by the Humanities Institute Science Studies Workshop with generous support from UB’s College of Arts and Sciences and the Clinical and Research Institute on Addictions 

Co-sponsored by the Departments of English, Geography, Global Gender and Sexuality Studies History, Sociology, Transnational Studies; the Center for Medical Humanities at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences; and Evergreen Health

Date: Monday, November 16, 2020
Time: 1:00 - 2:30 PM
Location: Zoom, link to come closer to event date

Hosts: David Herzberg and Michael Rembis

Selling Psychedelics: Balancing Patient Concerns, Profit Margins, and Professional Respectability at Hollywood Hospital, 1955-1973
Andrea Ens, Purdue University

Proprietary Medicine, Cocaine and Drug War Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Chicago
Richard Del Rio University of Chicago

Health Centres, Architecture, and Patient Attitudes to Group General Practice in the British National Health Service, 1945-1979
Andrew Seaton, New York University

Date: Thursday, November 19, 2020
Time: 7:00 - 8:30 PM
Location: Virtual - Visit UB Humanities Institute for link

There is a powerful tradition of utopian practice and thought in African American communities. From black towns like Mound Bayou, Mississippi to the lyrical imaginings of Afrofuturism Black utopias have been a potent response to racial inequality and suffering. At this moment of rupture, with the related crises of the pandemic, racial uprisings, climate change and economic decline, Black Utopian thought and practice offer alternative paths to the future. On Thursday, November 19 leading scholars and artists in the field of Afrofuturism and Black Utopia will engage in a conversation about the role Black Utopian thinking can play at this crucial moment.

Participants:
Organizer and moderator: Victoria W. Wolcott, Professor of History, University at Buffalo
Julian C. Chambliss, Professor of English with an appointment in History and the Val Berryman Curator of History at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University
John Jennings, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, UC Riverside
Alex Zamalin, Director of African American Studies and Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Detroit, Mercy.

Additional details, including registration information, forthcoming.

Date: December 4, 2020
Time: 3:00 - 5:00 PM
Location: Zoom (link to be provided shortly before event)

Please join us to celebrate the launch of Katherine Zubovich’s new book, Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin's Capital.

The Graduate History Association of the University at Buffalo (the GHA) is placing a call for papers for the 30th Annual Milton Plesur Graduate History Conference, to be held virtually on Saturday, March 6, 2021. Co-sponsored by the History Department, this conference enables graduate students to share current research with fellow students and faculty members from a variety of disciplines and fields, including, but not limited to: History, Political Science, Anthropology, Classics, English, Transnational Studies, Geography, Gender Studies, and Disability Studies.

For the 30th Annual Plesur Conference, the GHA especially seeks research addressing the theme of “(Ab)Normality.” Recognizing that norms and mores have dramatically varied across time and space, manifesting in decisions and attitudes that themselves have significantly altered the cultures and societies in which specific ‘norms’ exist, we seek papers that consider how constructions of normality or abnormality over time have played a role in shaping history—that (Ab)Normality has historical agency.

In recognizing that (Ab)Normality encompasses a multitude of topics and applications, we do not pose a singular definition of (Ab)Normality. We challenge scholars to question the varied ways this appears in their respective fields.  Work that employs multi-disciplinary approaches to the historical understanding of (Ab)Normality is especially encouraged.

Please send your proposal via email to plesur2021@gmail.com, which should include:

(1)  a 250-word abstract (including your main argument and methodology),

(2)  noting your school or other affiliation, and

(3)  your contact information.

The deadline for paper proposals is January 6, 2021. 

Accepted proposals will be notified by email by the end of January.