Speaker Series: Exploring Alternative Archives for Global Histories

The University of Alabama’s History Department will be hosting a series of lectures on global histories and cultures through October and November.

 

Global Histories poster

Monday Oct 24 – 7.30pm
Smith Hall, Room 205
More than a whore or a wench: Writing marginal histories in the early modern Atlantic World
Professor Jenny Shaw
Department of History,
University of Alabama
Jenny Shaw will explore the lives of two women, one indentured (the “whore”), one enslaved (the “wench”), in Barbados, 1675. She demonstrates the techniques historians use to write the lives of ordinary people, even when their stories are available only through the letters of elite men.

Friday Nov 4 – 7.30pm
Smith Hall, Room 205
Viewing Vietnamese History through Art from Colonialism to the Present
Professor Nora Taylor
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Nora Taylor will present a survey of Vietnamese painting from the establishment of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts d’Indochine in Hanoi in 1925, through decades of Vietnamese history up to the 21st century. She will present the work of artists who have made a signicant contribution to the nation’s art history and discuss how historical, political and social circumstances have shaped artistic practices in that country over the past 100 years.

Tuesday Nov 8 – 7.30pm
Gorgas Library, Room 205
Stories of the Buddha: Ancient, Medieval, Modern
Professor Kurtis Schaeffer
Department of Religious Studies,
University of Virginia
Stories of the Buddha’s life are as old as the Buddhist tradition, and continue to be told today. Kurtis Schaeffer will highlight surprising continuities and profound changes in the life stories of the Buddha as they have been told in ancient India, medieval Tibet, and contemporary Europe and North America.

Wednesday Nov 16 – 7.30pm
Gorgas Library Room 205
Television as Archive: What Can We Learn About American Politics from Watching Old Cop Shows?
Professor Rebecca Hill
American Studies Program,
Kennesaw State University
Rebecca Hill’s presentation focuses on the way that police, who had been dened as the enemies of the working-class by organized labor, and in popular culture more generally, came to be seen as denitively working-class by the 1980s, using examples from Barney Miller, Hill St. Blues, Roseanne, and Cagney and Lacey.