School of Humanities

Past Lecturers

• 

  Wayne TeBrake - Between 1529 and 1651 six major clusters of religious war engulfed Europe. Most of these wars ended in some form of political compromise, but even in the exceptional cases – for example, the civil wars in Scotland, Ireland, and England – religious war eventually yielded to religious peace. Though historians traditionally focus on the wars, this presentation will focus on the broad and durable pattern of religious peace that followed.
  Today, with headlines suggesting a new era of religious war on an even broader scale, religious peace seems elusive if not impossible. The evidence from European history, however, suggests otherwise. Using photographs to illustrate what religious peace actually looked like in early modern Europe – shared churches, nominally hidden worship spaces, clandestine sites for ritual practice, and the like – Te Brake shows how it is possible to envision and to work for a more peaceful future.
  
  February 22, 2017

• 

  Marianne Hirsch - How can the memory of violent pasts be mobilized for a more progressive and hopeful future? This talk responds to the renewed monumentality we find in memory museums, memorials and commemorative rituals that perpetuate nationalism and ethnocentrism. Connecting the memory of the Holocaust with that of other histories of political violence, the talk searches for mobile and mutable artistic practices that can effect little resistances and small acts of repair.
  Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University. She is one of the founders of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Social Difference and of its global initiative “Women Creating Change.” Hirsch was born in Romania and educated at Brown University, where she received her BA/MA and Ph.D. degrees. Her work combines feminist theory with memory studies, particular