Past Events

Sep

28

Lecture

Slavery and Race in the French Revolution with Jeremy Popkin

Location:

STEPS 101

September 28, 2026, 4:30 - 5:30pm

In 1789, the French revolutionaries issued their Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, whose first article proclaimed that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” But would they extend those rights to the 800,000 enslaved Black men and women in their colonies…

Apr

14

Lecture

Before Disability: Insanity, Race, and Rights in the Early United States with Dr. Sari Altschuler

Location:

STEPS 101

April 14, 2026, 4:30 - 5:30pm

The history of disability rights is often told as a recent one, but it is not. In the wake of the American Revolution, many of the differences we now call disabilities could be accommodated into citizenship—and for some even exemplified its promises. This talk looks specifically…

Mar

2

Lecture

Weapon of the Weak or an Abuse of Power by the Strong: Contested Idioms in Atlantic Poisoning Events with Dr. Chelsea Berry

Location:

STEPS 101

March 2, 2026, 4:30 - 5:30pm

Two durable idioms of talking about poison—a weapon of the weak versus an abuse of power by the strong—that Europeans and Africans had developed over centuries produced waves of eighteenth-century poison cases in the slave societies of the Americas with a shared focus on health…

Nov

19

Lecture

Stewing Alive: Public Bathing, Mineral Spas, and the Curative Commons in the British Atlantic World with Amanda E. Herbert

Location:

STEPS 101

November 19, 2025, 4:30 - 5:30pm

Today we think of a spa visit as a luxury getaway, a chance to rest, relax, and indulge. But four hundred years ago, visiting the spa was something very different: uncomfortable, embarrassing, and even painful, a necessary medicine that offered the promise of a powerful cure,…

Nov

5

Lecture

Putting Science to Work: Women Healers’ Pursuit of Medical Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia with Susan H. Brandt

Location:

STEPS 101

November 5, 2025, 4:30 - 5:30pm

In her mid-eighteenth-century medical recipe manuscript, Elizabeth Coates Paschall asserted her ingenuity and authority with the bold strokes of her pen. Paschall was a widowed Philadelphia Quaker merchant who ran a dry goods business. She was also well known in her community as…

Mar

18

Lecture

The Emergence of Anglophone Literature in Eighteenth-Century India and the Future of Postcolonial Studies with James Mulholland

Location:

STEPS 101

March 18, 2025, 4:30 - 6pm

This talk outlines a new literary history of British Asia, examining the emergence of anglophone literature within its earliest communities and cultural institutions through translocal and regional frameworks. By redefining anglophone writing in India as constituted by multi…

Feb

18

Lecture

Ethiopia’s Outstretched Hand: James Bruce’s Ethiopianism and the African Origins of a Global Idea with Rebekah Mitsein

Location:

STEPS 101

February 18, 2025, 4:30 - 6pm

In James Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1790), he makes a bold claim about the origins of humanity: Egypt was populated from Africa up; culture and learning spread from Ethiopia out. This talk, and the biography from which it comes, is a story about sources:…

Feb

6

Lecture

Plains, Hills and Mountains: The Balkan Peninsula in the Eighteenth Century with Professor Molly Greene

Location:

Linderman Library, Room 200

February 6, 2025, 4:30 - 6pm

This talk is intended as a response to Faruk Tabak’s sweeping study of the Mediterranean, The Waning of the Mediterranean 1550-1870: A Geohistorical Approach (2008). In the book Tabak argues that Mediterranean unity continued long past Braudel’s famous sixteenth century. The…

Oct

15

Lecture

Southeast Asia into the Eighteenth Century: The Lynchpin of Asia's Seaways with Professor Eric Tagliacozzo

Location:

STEPS 280

October 15, 2024, 4:30 - 5:30pm

Different parts of the world are said to have "entered modernity" – a tenuous phrase at best – at different times.  For Southeast Asia, there is an argument to be made that this transition was happening just as we move into the eighteenth century.  How and why was this…

Apr

11

Lecture

Edward Gibbon and Slavery: Decline and Fall and Rise with Linda Colley

Location:

STEPS 280

April 11, 2024, 4:30 - 6pm

Presented by the Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute for Eighteenth-Century Studies and Africana Studies, Linda Colley, Ph.D., Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History, Princeton University. Between 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, and 1788, the year before the…

Mar

7

Lecture

Eighteenth-Century Catawba Women, Pottery-making, Identity, and Nation-building with Brooke Bauer

Location:

STEPS 280

March 7, 2024, 4:30 - 6pm

Presented by the Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Institute for Indigenous Studies, Brooke Bauer, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Dr…

Dec

1

Lecture

The Empire's Pharmacy: The Real Protomedicato, Materia Medica, and A Collected Spanish Empire with Tim Betz

Location:

Maginnes Hall, Room 342

December 1, 2022, 12 - 1pm

Tim Betz, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History