The Eisenberg Institute will launch its 2023-24 programming on September 14, 2023, with a lecture by Professor Terrence J. McDonald (University of Michigan). The event kicks off the second year of the institute's "Against History" theme.
The theme aims to "unpack the divergent meanings and practices of history and explore the ideologies involved in its construction and deployment, as well as the dangers of attempts to whitewash the complexities that the past has to offer." See below for a full theme statement.
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Click the dates below to link to the event calendar entry, and click the names below to learn more about each speaker. Additional information—including titles and panelists—will be posted when available.
Fall 2023
- September 14 • 4 pm • Lecture
Who “Invented” Identity Politics?: The Role of Twentieth Century Frameworks and Histories in the Twenty-First Century Debate
Terrence J. McDonald (University of Michigan)
- September 15 • 12 pm • Symposium
Back from the Archives: Identity, Culture and the Politics of Writing History
Farina Mir, Ian Moyer, Carina Ray, Valerie A. Kivelson (moderator)
- September 28 • 4 pm • Lecture
Writing Enslaved Women’s Histories from the Crevices of the Archive
Sasha Turner (Johns Hopkins University)
- September 29 • 12 pm • Graduate Student Workshop
Atmospheres of Violence: Loss, Silence, and Affect in Archival Research
Dora Gao, Allie Goodman, Kristen Leer, Kathryn Babayan (moderator)
- October 26 • 4 pm • Lecture
The Invention of the Homeland: Racial Violence, Repatriation, and the Philippine Settler State
Adrian de Leon (University of Southern California)
- October 27 • 12 pm • Graduate Student Workshop
Writing Against History: Practicing the Past
Chantal Croteau, Orven Mallari, Caroline Murphy-Racette, Talitha Tukura Pam, Hakem Al-Rustom (moderator)
- November 16 • 4 pm • Lecture
Planters’ Progress: Local Coffee Science and Trans-Imperial Circulations Through Early Colonial Kenya
Paul Ocobock (University of Notre Dame)
- November 17 • 12 pm • Graduate Student Workshop
The Consequences of Colonialism, Capitalism, and Empire: Looking Out from the Archive
Justin Chun-Yin Cheng, Keanu Heydari, Leopoldo Solis Martinez, Mrinalini Sinha (moderator)
- November 30 • 4 pm • Lecture
Zorro and the Curse of History: Swashbuckling Through the United States’ Mexican Past
Anthony P. Mora (University of Michigan)
- December 8 • 12 pm • Symposium
Venue: Alfred A. Taubman Gallery, University of Michigan Museum of Art
Call and Response: Slavery, Art and the Politics of Repair
A Tour and Conversation with Jason R. Young
Winter 2024
- January 19 • 12 pm • Symposium
The Role of History in Investigative Reporting
Anna Clark, Kat Stafford, Stephen Berrey (moderator)
- January 25 • 4 pm • Lecture
Piercing Flesh and Joining Bones: The Materiality of the Body in the History of Chinese Medicine
Yi-Li Wu (University of Michigan)
- February 1 • 4 pm • Lecture
Listening to the Water, Capping a Verse: What Enslaved Women Did in the Medieval Mediterranean
Hannah Barker (Arizona State University)
- February 2 • 12 pm • Graduate Student Workshop
Journeys Across Time: Dynamic Histories of Movement and Migration
Paige Newhouse, Fadilat T. Olasupo, Lucy Smith, Mimi Brown Wooten, Ian Moyer (moderator)
- February 15 • 4 pm • Lecture
A Life in Planetary History
Perrin Selcer (University of Michigan)
- March 21 • 4 pm • Lecture
Memories of Iconoclasm and Violence in Indigenous Accounts of the “Conquest” of Mexico
Lisa Sousa (Occidental College)
- March 22 • 12 pm • Graduate Student Workshop
Rethinking Gender, Sexuality, and Colonialism
Rachael Barrett, Augusto Espinosa, Irene Mora, Sueann Caulfield (moderator)
- April 4 • 4 pm • Lecture
Promissory Talk and the Limits of Historical Imagination
Jolyon Thomas (University of Pennsylvania)
- April 5 • 12 pm • Graduate Student Workshop
The Media of History
Tori Herzig-Deribin, John Mirsky, Kristi Rhead, Helmut Puff (moderator)
- April 19 • 12 pm • Inclusive History Project-Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Symposium
Approaches to Oral History and the Work of Inclusive History
Camron Michael Amin, Alexis Antracoli, Lorena Chambers, Jay Cook (moderator)
2022-24 EIHS Theme: Against History
Who could be “against history”? If history is taken to be the sum total of all that has happened in the past, then history simply is, and it would be no more possible to be “against” history than to be “for” it.
From other perspectives, however, “history” might be very much something one can be either for or against. In the attempts to legitimate the invasion of Ukraine or the rewriting of US school curricula to remove “controversial” topics, the proponents appear to be acting “against history,” denying basic and well-established historical facts in order to produce ideologically acceptable narratives (even as that is the very accusation that such proponents raise against current historical pedagogies and curricula). Scholars writing in more critical traditions, whether coming from women’s and gender history or post-colonial studies or queer and trans studies or critical race theory, can be characterized as adopting approaches that are “against history,” where “history” stands for the authority of conventional analyses and traditional historicisms that have inevitably promoted particular epistemic certainties as well as silenced important aspects and experiences of the past. The positivism or empiricism or archival fetishism that some see as essential to the mainstream practice of history has engendered numerous alternative methods drawn from anthropology to literary studies, and from data science to speculative fabulation and affective anachronism, which challenge conventional historical writing. And for many liberation projects, arguing against the ways history has been used as a means to justify political actions, social institutions, legal decisions, domestic arrangements, and so on, or against the “dead weight” of history itself, has proven critical to imagining new and better futures.
“Against History” adopts as its starting point that history is a concept and a set of practices whose ideological work is often rendered invisible by the assumption that history’s narratives and analyses offer simply an objective empirical representation of the past. Instead, we want to unpack the divergent meanings and practices of history and explore the ideologies involved in its construction and deployment, as well as the dangers of attempts to whitewash the complexities that the past has to offer.
