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February 2019
Jews and the Americas
The 68th Annual Conference of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. Co-sponsored by the Alexander Grass Chair in Jewish Studies and the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica at the University of Florida. This multidisciplinary conference aims to explore various facets of the Jewish experience in the Americas from the 16th century until today. This experience has been shaped by intra-religious developments as well as through relations – actual, spiritual, and imaginary – with…
Find out more »Disabilities Studies Seminar: Key Words & Concepts, an Introduction to Disability Theory
Speaker: Dr. Heather Vrana, Assistant Professor of History & DRC Faculty Fellow
Find out more »March 2019
Graduate Student Symposium: Water and Wine: Disruption and Fluidity Over the Long Durée
The 2019 UF History Graduate Symposium will honor the 90th anniversary of the first publication of the Annales Journal, which dramatically transformed the post-WWII historical field. We invite graduate students to present their research influenced and inspired by, or disrupting, this varying legacy. In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of histoire totale and mentalités, which came to define the Annales School in the 1970s and 1980s, papers from all fields of the humanities that utilize an historical perspective are also…
Find out more »From Segregation to Black Lives Matter: A Symposium and Celebration of the Opening of the Joel Buchanan Archive of African American Oral History at the University of Florida
National Symposium organized by the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program and the George A, Smathers Libraries to commemorate the opening of the Joel Buchanan Archive of African American Oral History, a collection of more than six hundred oral histories with African Americans on topics including slavery, segregation, and civil rights. This is part of a three-day symposium that will feature films, exhibits, and lectures on African American history. Speakers will include Professor Larry Rivers, Florida A&M, Evelyn Foxx, President Alachua…
Find out more »April 2019
Douglas Brinkley Talk
Sponsored by the Bob Graham Center, the Rothman Family Chair in the Humanities, the Department of Journalism, and the Gus Burns Fund of the Department of History
Find out more »September 2019
“Workers Movements and the Arab Popular Uprisings of 2011”
A talk by Joel Beinin, Stanford University Arab workers, especially in Egypt and Tunisia, participated prominently in the popular uprisings of 2011. They were motivated by declining standards of living and loss of job security in the decades preceding the uprisings. In Tunisia, the mid-level leaders of the national trade union federation (the UGTT) and rank and file workers were critical participants in the movement that ousted president Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali. While there was a substantial movement of labor…
Find out more »Research in Progress Lunch: Dr. Daniel Rood
“The Rural Afterlives of Slavery: Landownership, Politics, and Farming Practice Among Black Farmers in Clarke County, Georgia, 1865-1980” Motivated by the controversy over the University of Georgia’s 2016 disturbance of a burial ground of enslaved people, this paper examines the "rural afterlives" of slavery by looking at the dynamics of race, land ownership, and agricultural transformation in Athens-Clarke County between 1865 and 1980. This paper is the earliest phase of a micro-history that will place everyday agricultural practice, ecological strategies, and small-scale investment decisions…
Find out more »October 2019
Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition
Talk by Dr. Liat Ben-Moshe, Assistant Professor, Criminology, University of Illinois at Chicago. Recent scholarship and activism paint a troubling picture of the American carceral state and chart a way out by utilizing the framework of abolition. But disability and madness and their histories of oppression and resistance are largely missing from as ways to inform policy and activist resolutions to incarceration. For example- the erasure of the most massive exodus of people from carceral enclosures in the U.S., deinstitutionalization.…
Find out more »Islam and the Spice Trade: Profit and Prophecy in the Global Middle Ages
A talk by Joel Blecher (Ph.D. Princeton) is Assistant Professor of History at George Washington University. He is the author of Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary across a Millennium (University of California Press, 2018). His current book project on Islam and the Spice Trade has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Library of Congress. This event is made possible by the Izzat Hasan Sheikh Endowment in Islamic…
Find out more »When They See Us: A Discussion of Race, Crime, and Justice
Panel discussion sponsored by the W. George Allen Chapter of the Black Law Students Association, speakers: Professor Kenneth Nunn, Levin College of Law Professor Sarah Wolking, Levin College of Law Moderator: Professor Katheryn Russell-Brown, Levin College of Law
Find out more »Museums & Slavery: Engaging the Past & the Present in the Public Sphere
A talk by Ana-Lucia Araujo, Department of History, Howard University. This talk is part of the 2019-2020 Series "Rethinking the Public Sphere, Part I"
Find out more »History Department Working Paper Series: “Pseudo-Martin of Braga and the Slavs: a re-examination of the poem ‘In basilica'”
A work in progress by Florin Curta. If you are interested in reading the paper before the talk, please contact Dr. Curta at fcurta@ufl.edu
Find out more »Prince of the Press
A talk by Joshua Teplitsky Assistant professor in the Department of History and the Program in Judaic Studies at Stony Brook University. He specializes in the history of the Jews in Europe in the early modern period, with a particular interest in cultures of knowledge-making, printing, and book collecting David Oppenheim (1664–1736), chief rabbi of Prague in the early eighteenth century, assembled a remarkable collection of Jewish books that today testifies to the myriad connections Jews maintained with each other across…
Find out more »November 2019
Movie Screening: Women of the Gulag
This screening will be followed by a discussion with the director, Marianna Yarovskaya
Find out more »2019 Conference: Society for the History of Discoveries
The Caribbean: A Cultural Encounter The conference schedule is here: https://discoveryhistory.org/2019-conference-schedule/ Throughout time, humans have ventured over the hill, beyond their own territories. Wherever such journeys of exploration have taken us, we have learned about ourselves while interacting with others and sharing our ideas, history, and culture. The Society for the History of Discoveries celebrates the geographic discoveries and cross-cultural interactions that result from travel around the globe and the exploration and mapping of Earth’s land and sea surfaces from earliest…
Find out more »History Department Working Paper Series: “’Unfitting words or speeches’ in Ireland’s 1641 depositions”
A work in progress presented by Grace Hoffman. If you would like a copy of this paper in advance, please contact Dr. Curta at fcurta@ufl.edu
Find out more »Ibram Kendi
Ibram Kendi will speak about his new book, How to Be an Antiracist This talk is sponsored by the Rothman Family Chair in the Humanities
Find out more »December 2019
History Department Working Paper Series: ”Land reform and nationalism. Negotiating national loyalty in interwar Transylvania”
A work in progress presented by Bogdan Dumitru. If you are interested in seeing a draft of this paper, contact Dr. Curta at fcurta@ufl.edu
Find out more »January 2020
History Department Working Papers: “Facing infant mortality: parental grief in the Roman Empire”
Presentation by Ciprian Cretu, Fulbright Scholar from Bucharest, Romania. For advanced copies of the paper, contact the author: ciprian.cretu@drd.unibuc.ro
Find out more »February 2020
1920-2020: A Century of Suffrage and Voter Suppression
The Gary C. and Eleanor G. Simons Lecture on American History. Speaker: Liette Gidlow, Associate Professor of History, Wayne State University
Find out more »Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities
A book talk with affiliated professor Lenny A. Ureña Valerio, presentations by Geoff Eley and Sueann Caulfield, University of Michigan.
Find out more »Hidden Lives Illuminated
Screening at the Museums Challenge Symposium presented by the Mellon Intersections Group on Mass Incarceration. At The Wooly (20 N. Main Street) Hidden Lives Illuminated is a project commissioned by Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site of animated short films created by artists incarcerated at the Pennsylvania State Corrections Institution at Chester and Philadelphia’s Riverside Correctional Facility for Women. Keynote speaker, Sean Kelley, Senior Vice President + Director of Interpretation will share remarks about the project. The Museums Challenge Symposium celebrates the work…
Find out more »“‘In Questionable Taste’: Performing Capitalism in the Gilded Age”
Lunchtime seminar featuring Dr. Jennifer Le Zotte, UNC Wilmington. This talk is funded by Sean Adams, the Hyatt and Cici Brown Professor of History.
Find out more »Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants
Lecture by Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia Hernandez, Sturm College of Law, University of Denver. Presented by the Mellon Intersections, Mass Incarceration Working Group See details here: https://humanities.ufl.edu/event/migrating-to-prison-americas-obsession-with-locking-up-immigrants-cesar-cuauhtemoc-garcia-hernandez/
Find out more »March 2020
“Is American ‘Different?’ Antisemitism and the Belief in American Exceptionalism”
Dr. Tony Michels, Department of History, University of Madison will be the speaker. The event is sponsored by Mitchell Hart, the Alexander Grass Chair in Jewish History.
Find out more »April 2020
History Department Honors Conference
The eleventh annual Honors Thesis Conference is the culmination of a process that students in the History Department’s honor’s seminar have been working on since last summer. In the summer of 2019, students began collecting and reviewing primary source material from a wide range of archives. Some students, used documents UF’s own Smathers Library. Others traveled to archives at the United Nations, Harvard University, the University of New Mexico, in Cuba and in Europe. Others used online resources, from Netflix…
Find out more »October 2020
UF Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Public Lecture – Professor Joan Waugh
The UF Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa invites you to join us on Monday, October 19, for a public lecture by Joan Waugh, renowned historian from UCLA and President-elect of the Society of Civil War Historians. Her talk is entitled “Lizzie Borden Took an Axe”: The Crime of the Century. Professor Waugh researches and writes about 19th-century America, specializing in the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age eras. The event is free and open to all, and no registration is required. Simply click…
Find out more »Achebe-Baldwin: Interrogate and Commemorate
In April 1980 renowned African writer Chinua Achebe and African American literary giant James Baldwin met for the first time at the African Literature Association conference devoted to the African Aesthetic. On the 40th anniversary of Achebe and Baldwin's historic encounter at the University of Florida, The Center for African Studies invites guests to a two-day event on October 22-23. We will probe the experiential archive through oral history, artifact, and memoir and will also engage in literature pertaining to Africa…
Find out more »February 2021
Research in Progress: From the Wobblies to the Grateful Dead: The Long Strange Posthumous Journey of Casey Jones
This paper will be presented by Zoom. A copy of the paper is available before the talk. To obtain a copy of the paper or to receive the zoom link to this talk, contact Professor Sean Adams. This presentation is sponsored by the Hyatt and Cici Brown Chair of History.
Find out more »March 2021
2021 Milbauer Symposium: Reimagining the Black Past: The Futures of Black Power
"Twenty Years of Black Power Studies: Reflections and Horizons" Dr. Ashley Farmer (UT-Austin) Abstract: When Peniel Joseph published “Black Liberation Without Apology: Reconceptualizing the Black Power Movement” in 2001, he ushered in the field of Black Power Studies. Since the publication of this Black Scholar article twenty years ago, the field has grown in depth and breadth making it one of the most exciting and dynamic branches of scholarship in American and African-American history. This keynote will discuss the overall…
Find out more »April 2021
2021 Milbauer Symposium: Reimagining the Black Past: The Futures of Black Power
“ ‘Something Bigger and Better’: The Rebirth of Black Banking in the United States, 1964-1983” Dr. Brandon Winford (University of Tennessee) Abstract: After the passage of milestone civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s, the United States experienced a rebirth in black banking. In particular, the emergence of new black-owned banks coincided with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Since the late nineteenth century, the majority of black banks operated in…
Find out more »Blues for the 1980s: Roger Troutman & Zapp and Dayton, OH
A Talk by Dr. Scot Brown, Associate Professor of African American Studies & History, UCLA Questions: contact Elizabeth Dale (edale@ufl.edu)
Find out more »The Influence of African Americans on French Caribbean and Black French Social Movements, 1920s-2020
A talk by Felix Germain, Assoc Professor Africana Studies, University of Pittsburg This talk will be on Zoom. For more information contact Elizabeth Dale (edale@ufl.edu)
Find out more »2021 Milbauer Symposium: Reimagining the Black Past: The Futures of Black Power
“Armed Mothering: Activism and Armed Black Women in the United States” Dr. Jasmin Young (UC-Riverside) Abstract: This article and talk is based on the experiences of several women who were armed revolutionaries and also mothers. While scholars of revolutions in Latin America, Africa and Asia have considered motherhood and armed resistance, scholars of the U.S. have little to say on the topic. Certainly, motherhood during the Black Power movement has been examined by a number of scholars, specifically focusing on…
Find out more »His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope
Jon Ellis Meacham will give the Inaugural lecture honoring Dr. Michael Gannon, Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Florida. Jon Ellis Meacham is a writer, reviewer, and presidential biographer. A former Executive Editor and Executive Vice President at Random House, he is a contributing writer to The New York Times Book Review, a contributing editor to Time magazine, and a former Editor-in-Chief of Newsweek. He won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for American Lion:…
Find out more »2021 Milbauer Symposium: Reimagining the Black Past: The Futures of Black Power
“‘Mr. Muhammad Says All of This is Possible for You and Me’: Elijah Muhammad, Muhammad Speaks, and Black Nationalism during the Space Age” Dr. D'Weston Haywood (Hunter CUNY) Abstract: Scholars have analyzed Elijah Muhammad and the NOI’s demands for a separate Black territory within the United States, but have missed another critical side of their separatism. In the late 1960s, Muhammad and the NOI hoped to also remove Black people from earth to another planet. At first glance, the idea…
Find out more »“Monstrous Births: Race and Defective Reproduction in 19th-Century U.S. Medical Science.”
A zoom talk by Miriam Rich, History of Medicine, Yale University For more information, contact Elizabeth Dale (edale@ufl.edu)
Find out more »2021 Milbauer Symposium: Reimagining the Black Past: The Futures of Black Power
TBA Dr. Hassan Jeffries (Ohio State University
Find out more »June 2021
Search committee meeting
Meeting of 19th century VAP search committee. Questions, contact Sean Adams, chair of the search committee: spadams@ufl.edu
Find out more »Search committee meeting
Questions? Contact Sean Adams, Chair of the Committee (spadams@ufl.edu)
Find out more »September 2021
UF History’s Workshop
Historians learn from each other and fine-tune their work by workshopping in-progress papers and chapters.
Find out more »October 2021
History Workshop with Sean Adams
Historians refine their ideas and texts by sharing -- "workshopping" -- their work-in-progress chapters and articles with colleagues and graduate students in and beyond their fields.
Find out more »The Trouble with Conversion: Jewish Converts and Christian Responses
The History Workshop at the University of Florida presents Nina Caputo with a work-in-progress chapter on Europe’s high middle ages.
Find out more »March 2022
History Workshop with Alice Freifeld, “Forced Labor: A Tour of Europe”
Please join us for our next History Workshop which will feature a pre-circulated paper by our esteemed colleague Alice Freifeld, recently retired but still flourishing with her scholarship. Alice has assembled a stunning array of three discussants, whose scholarship spans Germany (with our very own Norm Goda), France (Jean-Marc Dreyfus of Manchester), and Poland (with our new colleague joining us in the Fall, Natalia Aleksiun). PLEASE NOTE: due to time changes, we will convene at NOON. The Zoom link is…
Find out more »All the Glory in the World: How hubris and Diffidence Ignited the Streets of Cuba
For more than six decades, Cuba and its leaders have played an outsized role in international affairs, dominating discourse far beyond what a small island nation could expect. And yet, the ordinary Cubans who have lived with the interminable revolution have rarely been heard from.
Find out more »April 2022
Historical Writing (& Practice) Since Black Lives Matter
A roundtable with four historians from the University of Florida, including Bill Link, David Canton, Lillian Guerra and James Gerien-Chen.
Find out more »June 2022
CIFNAL Speaker Series: French Medieval Manuscripts at the BnF—Current Research Programs and Future Perspectives
Charlotte Denoël, Chief Curator of the Bibliothèque nationale de France's Manuscripts Department, presents on the Bibliothèque's collections and programs.
Find out more »September 2022
October 2022
History Workshop: Prof. Lillian Guerra’s Patriots and Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961-1981
We will be discussing two chapters from Lillian Guerra’s forthcoming book, Patriots and Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961-1981. The workshop will take place over Zoom. Contact Prof. Phillip Janzen for the chapter and link to the meeting. The discussant will be María de los Ángeles Torres, Distinguished Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan and has written many essays and chapters on immigration and US/Cuba relations. She is…
Find out more »November 2022
Soccer Diplomacy World Cup Watch Party
Soccer is the only sport played in every corner of the world. Can soccer also be an effective means of global diplomacy?
Find out more »December 2022
January 2023
Beyond the Headlines: Exploring Race and Newspaper Coverage in the Gainesville Sun from Reconstruction to the Present
Please join the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the Cotton Club Museum and Cultural Center on January 14, 4:30 pm for the inaugural event in the 2023 Challenging Racism public program series. Staff and students at the Gainesville Sun and the Proctor Program have embarked upon a partnership to explore the history of the Sun’s coverage of race relations from Reconstruction to the present in Gainesville. A panel of student and newspaper researchers will discuss their findings at the event. Light refreshments will be served.…
Find out more »February 2023
Dan Simone, Racing, Region, and the Environment: A History of American Motorsports
Dr. Dan Simone earned his Ph.D. from UF in 2009. He wrote his dissertation, “Racing, Region, and the Environment: A History of American Motorsports," under the guidance of Dr. Jack Davis. While at UF, he also served as Program Coordinator of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program. From 2010-2015, Dr. Simone taught World History and Environmental History courses at Monmouth University. In 2016, he was hired as Curator of the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, North Carolina, and held…
Find out more »March 2023
April 2023
History Honors Conference
Our annual showcase of theses by undergraduate honors students. For more on our program, check out its homepage here: https://history.ufl.edu/undergraduate-studies/undergraduate-honors-program/
Find out more »September 2023
Thomas van Gaalen, “Amigos de los Muelles.” Mapping how transatlantic solidarities shaped the Curaçaoan Radical Movement, 1900-1940
Towards the late 19th century, heightened patterns of exchange and interaction emerged between socialists across the world. The ideal of international solidarity, which had become increasingly important for socialists, attracted a wide variety of radicals from a wide variety of regions. Where historical scholarship has often treated socialism as, with Talbot Imlay, a “European phenomenon,” this presentation demonstrates how the socialist framework of international solidarity was adopted and adapted by diverse movements across the Atlantic. The presentation reframes the Dutch…
Find out more »Digital Archives as Decolonial Practice
Dr. Ricia Anne Chansky, Professor and Director of the Oral History Lab, UPR Mayaguez; Jose Morales Benitez, Librarian, UPR Mayaguez & Christina Boyles, Assistant Professor of Culturally Engaged Digital Humanities, Michigan State University Traditional academic research often relies on the violence of extraction—the taking of people, resources, goods, and ideas from the marginalized in order to serve the needs of those in power. Community-engaged research requires academics to reject extractive forms of knowledge acquisition and relegate authority and control of…
Find out more »October 2023
The Dialectics of the Antiquities Rush with Suzanne Marchand
Organized by UF’s Phi Beta Kappa Society Chapter.
Find out more »The Criminalization of Whooping in the Nineteenth-Century Choctaw Nation: A Case Study in Language and History
In the 19th century, the Choctaw Nation passed a law to criminalize whooping, and many Choctaw citizens were prosecuted for this crime in the period between 1880 and 1906. This talk considers the linguistic, historical, and anthropological meanings of whooping for Choctaw people and the forces that led to its eventual criminalization.
Find out more »November 2023
Pub Trivia Event
Join the Bob Graham Center and the Department of History for a fun night of trivia, food, and prizes! Trivia will include questions on history, international affairs, pop culture, and more.
Find out more »January 2024
February 2024
Sharony Andrews Green, The Chase and Ruins: Zora Neale Hurston in Honduras (History Graduate Student Guest Lecture Series)
Dr. Sharony Andrews Green, Associate Professor of African American History at the University of Alabama, will be a guest speaker at the first History Graduate Student Guest Lecture Series. Sharony will discuss her new book: The Chase and Ruins: Zora Neale Hurston in Honduras (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023). The book follows Hurston's little-known anthropological expedition to excavate Mayan ruins in Honduras in the 1940s. Dr. Riché J. Daniel Barnes, Associate Professor of Anthropology, and PhD Candidate Joe Angelillo will serve…
Find out more »