History Hugh Hawkins Lecture

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Tim Brook A Canadian historian whose writings situate Ming China in the world and bring the perspective of the world to our understanding of China. Among his more popular books are The Confusions of Pleasure (California 1998), Vermeer’s Hat (Bloomsbury 2008), Mr. Selden’s Map of China (Profile 2013), and Great State: China and the World (HarperCollins 2020). His current projects include climate disasters in Ming China, Confucian statecraft thought, and the library of the 17th-century English legal scholar John Selden. Thursday, March 9, 2023 – 5:00 PM Fayerweather Hall - 115 Pruyne Lecture Hall

" Great Power, Great State: China Present and Past"

The United Nations world order emerged in the context of European history as an institution recognizing the sovereign equality of all states, large and small, yet perpetuating the Great Powers of the 19th century. As China emerges on the world stage, it imagines itself as a Great Power. But another history is at work, the history of the Great State that, like the Great Power, is hidden in plain sight.

Gabriela Soto Laveaga Professor of the History of Science and Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico at Harvard University     Image

"Hunger Narratives: Science and the Failed Attempt to End World Hunger" Mid-twentieth century concerns of an over-populated, hungry world led scientists to develop high-yielding wheat seeds. Billed as the cure to world hunger, these new seeds flooded the world market and transformed crop production as we know it, often in unplanned ways. Today environmental degradation, indebted farmers, and farmer suicides flourish in some of the same spaces that embraced these seed technologies. This talk examines what can we learn about grand narratives to end social problems by explicitly centering on experimental stations in Mexico as the place where these seeds originated.                 Thursday, March 24 - 4:30 pm  Paino Lecture Hall, 107, Beneski

Open to Amherst students, staff, and faculty. Please bring your college ID.

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Why Trust Science?
By Dr. Naomi Oreskes
Princeton University Press

Virtual Lecture by Dr. Naomi Oreskes, Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University and the author of Why Trust Science?

Diversity Isn't Just the Right Thing to Do;
Diversity Helps Us Get the Right Answers

April 14, 2021 5:30-7pm

Science has lagged behind other professions in working to purposefully create opportunities to expand diversity in its workforce. Critics of such efforts have framed diversity as antithetical to the pursuit of excellence in scientific inquiry, but this framing has the problem backwards. In this talk, I argue that we cannot have scientific excellence without diversity.

Register in advance for this meeting

Note: After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Please keep this email so that you can use the personal pass code and link provided in it to enter the Zoom event. The organizer does not have access to your code.

Hugh Hawkins Lecture

The annual Hugh Hawkins Lecture is named in honor of the late Professor Hugh D. Hawkins. Professor Hawkins was the Anson D. Morse Professor of History and American Studies upon his retirement from the faculty in 2000, after forty-three years of teaching at Amherst. He was a distinguished scholar of American higher education, the American South, and of cultural and intellectual history. In 1976 he was the principal architect of the first-year Introduction to Liberal Studies curriculum, and he helped build both the History and American Studies Departments.

“Mother of Exiles': Refugees in American History and Myth”

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Mae Ngai

Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History
Columbia University

Thursday, October 10
4:30 p.m.
Paino Lecture Hall 
107 Beneski

Emma Lazarus called America the “mother of exiles” in her poem, “The New Colossus,” which graces the Statue of Liberty. This lecture examines the enduring idea of America as a land of hope and refuge for the persecuted and oppressed. It goes beyond the familiar narratives of the Puritan settlers and the Statue of Liberty to think about how the idea of asylum has historically justified and obscured nation-building and racial agendas. It will compare the politics surrounding cold war refugees from Europe, Cuba, and Asia, and consider the contemporary recasting of Central American asylum seekers as undocumented migrants.

Mae Ngai is the Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and a Professor of History at Columbia University. She is the author of the award-winning Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. (Columbia's full profile)

The annual Hugh Hawkins Lecture honors the late Hugh D. Hawkins. Professor Hawkins was the Anson D. Moore Professor of History and American Studies upon his retirement from the faculty in 2000, after forty-three years of teaching at Amherst. He was a distinguished scholar of American higher education, the American South, and of cultural and intellectual history. In 1976 he was the principal architect of the first-year Introduction to Liberal Studies curriculum, and he helped build both the History and American Studies Departments. 

This lecture is free and open to the public.

Event Flyer: 

“Against the World: Deglobalization in Interwar Europe”

Tara Zahra
Homer J. Livingston Professor of History
The University of Chicago

Thursday, February 7th
4:30 p.m.
Paino Lecture Hall 
107 Beneski

For decades before the First World War, the world seemed to shrink. Millions of migrants crossed the globe. The railway and steamship accelerated their journeys, and reduced the cost and risk of travel. To many observers, the growing interconnection of people and states seemed unstoppable. They believed that it would produce progress, prosperity, and peace. These illusions were, however, shattered in 1914, when the First World War ushered in a quarter century of anti-global retrenchment. This talk will explore deglobalization in interwar Europe. Why did so many Europeans reject globalization after the First World War? What relationship did these anti-global movements have to the rise of radical political movements on the far right and left? And to what extent do the anti-global politics of interwar Europe resemble those of our own time?

Tara Zahra is the Homer J. Livingston Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Her research and teaching focus on the transnational history of Modern Europe. Zahra is most recently the author of The Great Departure: Mass Migration and the Making of the ‘Free World’ (Norton, 2016). Her previous books include The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II (Harvard University Press, 2011) and Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands (Cornell, 2008) and (co-edited with Leora Auslander), Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement (Cornell, 2018). Her current projects include a co-authored history of World War I in the Habsburg Empire (with Pieter Judson), and a history of deglobalization in interwar Europe.

The annual Hugh Hawkins Lecture honors Hugh D. Hawkins. Professor Hawkins was the Anson D. Moore Professor of History and American Studies upon his retirement from the faculty in 2000 after forty-three years of teaching at Amherst.  He was a distinguished scholar of American higher education, the American South, and of cultural and intellectual history.  In 1976 he was the principal architect of the first-year introduction to Liberal Studies curriculum and he helped build both the History and American Studies departments. 

This lecture is free and open to the public.

2017: Craig Steven Wilder
"The Approaching Past: Legacies of Slavery and Conquest on Campus"

2016: Arne Westad
"Worlds Apart: The Cold War in the 20^th Century"

2015: Pekka Hamalainen
"The Comanche Empire and the Grand Narrative of American History"

2014: Mark Mazower
"Does Fascism Mean Anything Anymore?: Europe Then and Now"

2013: Charles C. Mann '76
"1493: Entwining Ecology and History"

2012: Rebecca J. Scott
"She Had Always Enjoyed her Freedom: Reenslavement and the Law in the Era of the Haitain  Revolution"

2011: Martha Sandweiss
"Unpacking a Photograph: Small Stories, Big Ideas, and Tales of Race and Violence from the American West"

2009: Dipesh Chakrabarty
"Between Globalization and Global Warming: The Long and the Short of Human History"

2008: Londa Schiebinger
"Exotic Abortifacients: Gender Politics of Plants in the 18th Century Atlantic World"

2007: Donald Worster
"On John Muir's Trail: Nature in an Age of Liberal Principles"

2006: Elliott West
"Disease and the Making of Empires: Why it Matters that Lewis and Clark Didn't Get Sick (Or at Least REALLY Sick)"

2005: David W. Blight
"Seizing Freedom: The Emancipation of Wallace Turnage and John Washington"

2004: William Cronon
"The Portage: Time, Memory, and Storytelling in the Making of an American Town"

2003: John Lewis Gaddis
"9/11 as History"

2002: Drew Gilpin Faust
"Missing in Action: Naming the Dead in the American Civil War"