Among the Baroque paintings held in the Royal Collection in London are two works from the early modern Netherlands: the Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn's Portrait of the Shipbuilder Jan Rijcksen and his Wife Griet Jans, 1633, and the Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck's Cupid and Psyche, 1640. At first glance, these paintings could not look more different, yet they have more in common than at first appears.

Graduate Seminar building on Prof. Berman's talk "Figuring out Europe: Nation, State and the European Union in the German Public Sphere"

Graduate Seminar building on Prof. Berman's talk Is the Ivory Tower an Iron Cage? Why We Need to Reform Humanities Education

Any serious attempt at understanding Japan’s modern financial system must address the role of state. From the Meiji regime’s introduction of a national banking system in the early 1870s, the commutation of the annual pensions of the samurai with a single issue of kinroku kosai, or hereditary pension bonds, in 1875, through to the establishment of the Postal Savings System, the Bank of Japan, the Yokohama Specie Bank, and seven other “special” parastatal banks in the latter part of the Meiji period, the state orchestrated the development of Japan’s financial infrastructure.

*Part of the History Department's Book Symposia Series*

Featuring commentary by:
Billy Hutchinson (Progressive Unionist Party, Northern Ireland)
David Miller (CMU)
Peter Shirlow (Queen's University-Belfast)

*As part of the Provost's Inaugural Lecture Series, Holger Hoock will deliver an Inaugural Lecture as J. Carroll Amundson Professor of British History.

Pitt hosts the oldest chair in British History in the United States, endowed half a century ago this academic year.
In this talk, as a part of the Provost’s Inaugural Lecture series, Holger Hoock will discuss work in progress on
violence in the American Revolutionary War as a civil war in the British Empire and in America. Most modern

This paper considers how a seventeenth-century German Automaton featuring the Roman Goddess Diana atop a stag made its way to the court of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir (1569-1627), and it explores this object's social life outside of its putative home of the Holy Roman Empire.

Since the reign of Emperor Akbar the Great (d. 1605), paintings produced in Mughal India began to evince responses from Mughal artists to European art. This lecture centers on the phenomenon of what I term “Mughal Occidentalism,” namely the trans-global style and visual expression that Mughal artists and patrons developed following the meeting of Indian painting with Renaissance art; the use of European pictorial techniques by Muslim and Hindu artists; and the transformation of Christian visual culture into an Indian idiom.

Marina Skordeli is the Director of the Jean Monnet Center at the University of Athens). Come for an informal discussion about her work and your interests.

Titian’s Ecce Homo and Mater Dolorosa with Open Hand (both Madrid, Museo del Prado) stand out for a number of reasons. Firstly, they were not commissioned but were done as gifts, so they reflect Titian’s artistic volition rather than the will of a patron. Secondly, the materials that Titian chose to use demand attention: the Ecce Homo is painted on slate while the Mater dolorosa is painted on a slab of marble.