February 2022
Historical Fictions Research Network Conference
Theme: Communities How communities construct their own pasts; how communities challenge the narratives that have been foisted upon them or are used to oppress and discriminate; how communities challenge their own consensual understandings of their past. The theme of the 7th annual conference of the Historical Fictions Research Network is “Communities” and spans a wide array of topics across the disciplines of Archaeology, Architecture, Literature, Art History, Cartography, Geography, History, Memory Studies, Musicology, Reception Studies, Linguistics, Cultural Studies, Museum Studies,…
Details »March 2022
Breaking (Bad) Glass: Yale University Reluctantly Changes Course
The conference them is Resistance and (Re)Generation. My presentation offers a reading of the use of stained glass at Yale University, and how this art form, when deliberately broken, spurred on major changes at a recalcitrant elite university whose history and everyday life is intertwined with its economically-challenged home city. The sound of breaking glass in what was then called Calhoun College at Yale University on June 13, 2016 signaled the death knell for that college’s name and highlighted the…
Details »May 2022
Revolutionary Houses, Revolutionary Narratives: Historic House Museums on the Eve of America’s 250th Anniversary
Facilitators: Sara Evenson, SUNY Albany Anne Lindsay, California State University, Sacramento Laura Macaluso, Independent Scholar Hilary Miller, Golden Ball Tavern Museum and Pennsylvania State University Amy Speckart, Rare Book School at the University of Virginia In the US, the Revolutionary-Era historic house museum plays a long-standing and central role in the presentation and interpretation of early American history for the public. Successive generations of historians and heritage practitioners, from the amateur to the professional, have built a substantial and enduring…
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Chicago Summer School
The Chicago Summer School focuses on the American roots of Modernism. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, progressive architects and patrons moved the city to the forefront of technological and aesthetic experimentation. Through expert lectures and tours, course directors Tina Strauss ad John Waters lead a survey of 19th and early 20th century architecture, design, art, landscape and preservation.
Details »September 2022
The Place of the Urban Past before “Public History,” 1850-1960
Historians that have studied the experience of modernity have often looked to periods of industrialisation and urbanisation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many approaches and definitions of modernity co-exist, but, in general, an element of rupture – a distinctive and often conscious break with the past – has dominated. Yet ‘the past’ did not necessarily disappear with urban transformations. Both the historic environment, and civic understandings of history within that space, could be used as a way to…
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