The Eisenberg Institute continues its Winter 2014 Thursday Speaker Series on January 30, 4 p.m., 1014 Tisch Hall, with Nancy Hunt's lecture, "Form = Material ??? Flywhisks and Catastrophe Logic in a Colonial Milieu." The talk follows the Institute's 2013-15 theme, "Materials of History." Link for a lecture abstract. Free and open to the public.

Nancy Hunt is a professor of history at the University of Michigan. A specialist of history and anthropology in Africa, she focuses on matters medical, therapeutic, and gender, while paying attention to material objects, everyday technologies, visual culture, and violence. Her first book, an ethnographic history set in the Belgian Congo and then Zaire, A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Work, Medicalization, and Mobility (Duke, 1999), received the Herskovits Book Prize in 2000. A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Duke, forthcoming) analyses two intertwined domains--the securitization of therapeutic insurgency, and the medicalization of infertility--in a part of the Belgian Congo (1908-60), which became iconic as a zone of rubber extraction, war, and horrific violence in the period when Congo was King Leopold’s Free State (1885-1908). She is also working on a condensed world history of health and medicine for Oxford University Press.

On Friday, January 31, 12 p.m. in 1014 Tisch Hall, the Eisenberg Institute presents the workshop, "History for the Digital Future: Digital Forms of Historical Scholarship." Special guest Benjamin M. Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, will consider how technology changes the ways historians conduct and publish their research. Link for a workshop abstract and short biography for Professor Schmidt. Lunch provided. Free and open to the public.

These events have been made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg with additional support from the Department of American Culture.

Image: Fly whisk, Zaire, Royal Ontario Museum.