The Global Studies Center and the Humanities Center invites the university community to participate in this year’s lecture series: Empire and Imperialism.

Throughout the year, we bring internationally-renowned scholars to campus to speak to our theme from their own (inter)disciplinary perspectives. Each of our guests presents a public lecture on Thursday afternoon at 5pm. This year’s seminar features four visitors:

Laura Doyla is Professor of English at UMass Amherst. Her research explores the dynamic intercultural formation of literary texts: the ways that they are written and read within an uneven, volatile, geopolitical field of relations; the ways that literary genres and traditions often intimate the long history of these writing conditions; and the ways authors and readers imagine positions at odds with the geopolitical field.

Sumatra Ramaswamy is Professor of History at Duke University. She is a cultural historian of South Asia and the British Empire and her research over the last few years has been largely in the areas of visual studies, the history of cartography, and gender. She is also pursing new research on the cultures of learning in colonial and postcolonial India.

Frederick Cooper is a Professor of History at NYU. His interests include slavery and labor in the 19th- and 20-th century East Africa, the shifting nature of colonial thinking and practices, and the relationship of social change and conflict to decolonization in French and British Africa. His work seeks to counter both the national and the modern bars of most historical studies through the study of empires.

Jeanne Morefield is a Professional Fellow at Australian Catholic University and a Professor of Politics at Whitman College. Her scholarship works at the intersection of political theory, history, and international relations, examining a variety of topics including the relationship between the contemporary and historical rhetorics of imperialism and the conflict between democracy and sovereignty.

The Global Studies Center and the Humanities Center invite applications from faculty to participate in this year’s faculty development seminar: Empire and Imperialism. The purpose of this seminar is to bring colleagues from the humanities and the social sciences (as well as cognate professional schools) together for a series of lectures and workshops in which they will jointly explore questions that highlight the urgency of thinking globally about the humanities and humanistically about globalization. (Advanced Ph.D. students who are ABD and writing on related topics may also apply.)

Talija Art Company was established in 1998 in Belgrade, Serbia. Representing a rich and colorful program, Talija performs folk music and dance from all regions of former Yugoslavia, as well as from Hungary, Romania, Russia and Bulgaria. Their core repertoire is comprised of the customs and folk tales gathered from these cultures, and the troupe uses motion as the element building the colorful traditions of music and dance together.