Friday, May 30
9:30 - 9:45 AM
Breakfast and check-in
9:45 - 10:00 AM
Alan Karras & Shane Carter - Program Introduction
10:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Utopianism at the Dawn of the Modern Age (and Reflections for the Post-postmodern Age)
Speaker: Jesse Sponholz
Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia is often treated as inventing utopian thinking, which has been seen as unleashing creative energies in support of social reform or imposing European orders on new colonial landscapes in the Americas. In many ways, though, More’s work was not the origin point for utopianism, but just one example of how utopianism was an understandable response to epistemological revolutions taking place as the world first globalized. If that’s the case, can humans’ utopian responses in sixteenth-century Europe and Latin America provide inspiration for us as we grapple the epistemological crises of today?
12:30 - 1:30 PM
Lunch
1:30 - 4:00 PM
Topic: Colonization and Emergence of Resistance in Algeria
Speaker: Michelle Rose Mann
Exact title and talk description, TBA
From Invisible to Erased: Women’s Work in the Battle of Algiers
Speaker: Devin Leigh
This presentation will examine the ways women rebels contributed to the anti-colonial movement in French Algeria during the Battle of Algiers (1956 – 1957), as well as how those contributions were silenced in historical representations after independence. Rebel women like Djamila Bouhired, Samia Lakhdari, and Zohra Drif advanced their nation’s struggle for independence by understanding and strategically navigating colonial perceptions of race, sex, and gender. Bouhired, Lakhdari, and Drif rendered themselves invisible in colonial spaces for the purpose of gathering information, smuggling weapons, and planning attacks. After independence, male veterans and their allies erased rebel women’s agency and intelligence in the popular 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, which depicted women like Bouhired, Lakhdari, and Drif as unnamed and unthinking foot soldiers in a male-dominated movement. An analysis of these events reminds us that ideas about sex and gender are tools of power in memory as well as history.
Saturday, May 31
9:30 - 10:00 AM
Breakfast and check-in
10:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Decentering the Cold War: Decolonization, Development, and Third-Way Movements
Speaker: Brenna Miller
While studies of the Cold War often center the rivalry between the US and Soviet Union and its global impact, this talk will consider what we can learn by looking at the post-World War II era in world history from the vantage point of newly decolonized and Non-Aligned states. In particular, it will focus on the challenges they faced, the strategies they employed to secure independence, and efforts to “develop” across the Cold War. The talk will serve as an introduction and framing for the subsequent session engaging the History for the 21st Century module “Dams, Development, and Decolonization” (currently in production), which examines case-studies of post-war damming development projects in Egypt, Ghana, and India.
12:30 - 1:30 PM
Lunch
1:30 - 4:00 PM
Spacing out History: Chronology and Sovereignty from Asia to Outer Space
Speaker: Phillip Guingona
This talk explores how how medieval and early modern Asian polities shifted from an unspoken “system” of overlapping and intertwined sovereignties into an imperially-driven treaty-enforced understanding of strict borders and absolute citizenship. It leverages this exploration of pre- and post-Westphalian notions of space to help us approach territorial disputes, governing cyberspace, and exploring outer space today with more humility and creativity. By venturing into these evolving relationships with space over multiple centuries, this talk also subtly undermines some chronological imperatives that instruct our teaching.
