Past History Department Events
This page highlights some of our past events in the Department of History. To see our upcoming events, please visit this page.
Purdue Human Rights Program
March 27, 2025
Via Zoom
3:00-4:15 PM
Via Zoom
3:00-4:15 PM
"Justice as a Spiritual Quest: Human Rights in the African Imagination"
Dr. Chielo Eze
Dr. Chielo Eze
Presented as part of the Purdue Human Rights Program
The Human Rights Lab welcomes Dr. Chielo Eze (PhD from Purdue University; MFA). Dr. Eze will present, “Justice as a Spiritual Quest: Human Rights in the African Imagination” on Thursday , March 27th, at 3pm on Zoom.
Dr. Eze is Director and Professor of Africana Studies at Carleton College, author of Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination: We, Too, Are Humans.
About the talk: Resting on Walter Benjamin’s conception of the spiritual elements of class struggle, and inspired by Nelson Mandela’s philosophy, Dr. Eze will suggest alternative ways of engaging human rights today. Equally important is Michael Ignatieff’s notion of ordinary virtues of tolerance, forgiveness, resilience, and trust.
History on Tap
March 25, 2025
Thieme and Wagner Brewery
652 Main St, Lafayette, IN 47901
The History on Tap event for March will be held at Thieme and Wagner Brewery on Tuesday, March 25th, at 7:00 PM. Kostia Moharychev will be delivering a presentation titled "AI and The Fiddler on the Roof: Kyiv Suburbia Through the Lens of the 1897 Census."
10th Biennial Purdue History Graduate Student Association Conference
March 8, 2025
at Purdue University in West Lafayette
at Purdue University in West Lafayette
This conference is open to interested attendees, with content focused on topics of interest to graduate students and history majors, including those in the undergraduate History Honors program. Graduate students from universities outside of Purdue are welcome to attend!
Learn more and register for the 2025 HGSA Conference at this link.
Download the complete Conference Schedule as a PDF.
Guest Speaker: Too Black
February 28, 2025
6:00-7:30 PM
WALC 3090
Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits
Abstract
What does it mean to conquer a people and then call said conquest a society? How does a fabricated society built upon conquest legitimise its actions? It must launder as a means to make its “grimey” activity appear clean. When opposition inevitably arises within the conquered, their rage must be subsumed by the State to further clean the oppression. Laundering Black Rage chronicles the rise of the capitalist State while examining the historical dillution of Black Rage. It demonstrates how the maintenance of capitalism increasingly requires the manufactured consent of the conquered.
Much has been made in international headlines about scandals of high-profile Black Lives Matter leaders following the George Floyd protests but what if the scandals were just gross expressions of a much more ingrained process of counterinsurgency? How was the contagious Black Rage provoked by the police officer's knee on a poor Black man's neck converted into a benign commodity that could be massively marketed by Disney? How does the Black Rage embroiled in the global south become justification for death making sanctions and regime change? Laundering Black Rage reaches behind the front to trace the criminal origins.
The spaces we occupy, the cities we breathe all bribe us with a lifestyle that compels us to carry on the laundering of conquest. For many, survival is dependent upon it. By examining how the state-fabricated formations of labour (race, class, gender) remain organised even when the conquered populations are clearly enraged, we hope to arrive at an analysis to help reverse the process.
Biography
Too Black is a poet, scholar, organizer and filmmaker who blends critical analysis with biting sarcasm. He has headlined various stages and events including the historic Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City, Princeton University, and Johannesburg Theater in South Africa. His words have been published in online publications such as Black Agenda Report, Left Voice, Hammer and Hope and Hood Communist. He is currently the host of the Black Myths Podcast, a podcast debunking the BS said about Black people. Lastly, he the co-director of the award-winning documentary film The Pendleton 2: They Stood Up.
Guest Speaker: Dr. Holly A. Crocker
Part of the Medieval/Renaissance Series
February 26, 2025
4:30 PM, WALC 2051
February 26, 2025
4:30 PM, WALC 2051
Feminist Subjectivity, Women's Mastery, and Chaucer's Wife of Bath
Join us for snacks and a lecture with Dr. Holly A. Crocker, Carolina Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. Series supported by: Department of English, Department of History, School of Languages and Cultures, School of Interdisciplinary Studies, and Purdue Libraries.
Download the event flyer at this link.
History on Tap
February 25, 2025
Thieme and Wagner Brewery
652 Main St, Lafayette, IN 47901
The first History on Tap of the Spring 2025 semester will be held at Thieme and Wagner Brewery on Tuesday, February 25th, at 7:00 PM. Vipanchika Sahasri Bhagyanagar, a second year PhD student, will deliver a presentation titled "Better Prisons" and the Politics of Archives: Richard Henry Higgins and the Medical Experiments in McNeil Island Prison, 1952.
Fighting for Freedom Within the U.S. Army
February 13, 2025
5:00-6:30 PM
RAWL 2079
This talk features Assistant Professor of History Dr. Jonathan Lande, author of Freedom Soldiers: The Emancipation of Black Soldiers in Civil War Camps, Courts, and Prisons. This talk will explore the experience of Black Civil War soldiers who abandoned their military posts for brief periods of time to support their enslaved families. Thse soldiers stated in mililtary courts and from military prisons that they left to make freedom meaningful after decades in chains. Their dogged efforts reveal that the war of emancipation fought so bravely in combat continued in the army's camps and military justice system. Response provided by Ignatius Gyapong, PhD graduate student in the Department of History.
Learning to Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (2023)
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
Time: 5:30 - 7:00 PM
Krannert Auditorium, Room 140
Time: 5:30 - 7:00 PM
Krannert Auditorium, Room 140
How and why, in the latter half of the twentieth century, did theories of “code” developed around cybernetics and information theory take root in research settings as varied as electrical engineering, Palo Alto family therapy, Parisian semiotics, and cultural theories taking root at US liberal arts colleges? Drawing on his recently published book “Code: From Information Theory to French Theory” (Duke UP, 2023) this talk explores how data-driven exercises from Dutch Bali to MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) inspired these varied and diverse audiences in a common dream of “learning to code.” The result is a new history of the obscure ties linking Progressive Era technocracy and the prestige of engineering to the rise of “theory” in the humanities and social sciences.
In Code, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan reconstructs how Progressive Era technocracy as well as crises of industrial democracy and colonialism shaped early accounts of cybernetics and digital media by theorists including Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray. His analysis casts light on how media-practical research forged common epistemic cause in programs that stretched from 1930s interwar computing at MIT and eugenics to the proliferation of seminars and laboratories in 1960s Paris. This mobilization ushered forth new fields of study such as structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology while forming enduring intellectual affinities between the humanities and informatics. With Code, Geoghegan offers a new history of French theory and the digital humanities as transcontinental and political endeavors linking interwar colonial ethnography in Dutch Bali to French sciences in the throes of Cold War-era decolonization and modernization.
American Political History Conference (2022)
The Past, Present, and Future of American Democracy
At a moment when democracy is under assault in the U.S. and abroad, and when grassroots activism is rapidly and radically altering the terms of political debate, U.S. political history has been thriving, both inside the academy and in the wider world of activism, journalism, and politics. This conference aimed to bring together cutting-edge scholarship with new forms of public engagement to use historical research and thinking to understand and address twenty-first century political challenges. This event brought political historians into conversation with one another and the broader public and grapple with the idea of what it means to study American political history. It created opportunities to build networks, share new research, debate ideas, think about the implications of this research in our contemporary setting, and discuss strategies for public engagement. This conference aimed to encourage expansive reassessments of the parameters of American political history and the ways in which we disseminate historical scholarship within and outside the academy.
This conference was held in person, but there were options to participate virtually, including a Saturday Keynote Lunch Conversation on “Reproductive Rights and Politics,” with Gillian Frank, Jennifer Holland, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, and Mary Ziegler.
A copy of the program can be found here.
Women in the White House (2018)
Former First Lady Laura Bush and daughters Barbara and Jenna visited Purdue University's Elliott Hall of Music on Oct. 18, 2018 for the Sears Lecture Series event, "Women in the White House and Beyond." The Bush women discussed life in politics and their advocacy since President George W. Bush left the White House with associate professor of history Kathryn Brownell. Presented by College of Liberal Arts and Department of History.