2012-2013
Wednesday, December 12
Professor Eve Troutt Powell, University of Pennsylvania
Other People's Help: Studying Slavery in Cultures Not Your Own
DATE: Wednesday, December 12th
TIME: 7:00 PM
LOCATION: Parkway Central Library, Room 108 (1901 Vine St., Philadelphia, PA)
In this lecture, Eve Troutt Powell will explore the legacies of slavery in the Middle East, and the pitfalls of this kind of research. How have societies far from the United States' experience of slavery integrated the experience of slavery in their histories? How have they differed in constructions of racial or ethnic identity from how Americans have identified connections between race and slavery?
Eve M. Troutt Powell is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania where she teaches the history of the modern Middle East. Her most recent book is Tell This in my Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2012). She is also the author of A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain and the Mastery of the Sudan (University of California, 2003). Professor Powell is a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.
Book signing to follow; books provided by the Penn Book Center.
For more information, please contact
Octavia Carr
octaviac@sas.upenn.edu
Wednesday, March 20
Professor Kathy Peiss, University of Pennsylvania
The Zoot Suit in American Culture
DATE: Wednesday, March 20th
TIME: 7:00 PM
LOCATION: Parkway Central Library, Room 108 (1901 Vine St., Philadelphia, PA)
Before there were hippies and hip-hop, there was the zoot suit, embraced by African American, Latino, working-class youth, and "swing kids" in the 1940s. The style sparked public controversy, however, when it appeared to trigger violence in wartime Los Angeles, an event quickly termed the 'zoot suit riot.' Why did this extreme urban look emerge, and why was it both compelling and scandalous? In this lecture, Kathy Peiss explores the zoot suit's history and meaning for the rise of American youth culture and the politics of style.
Kathy Peiss is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches modern U.S. cultural history and the history of gender and sexuality. Her publications include Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (1986), Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (1998), and Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style (2011).
Book signing to follow; books provided by the Penn Book Center.
For more information, please contact
Nari Baughman
nlinette@sas.upenn.edu
Monday, April 22
Jonathan Steinberg, University of Pennsylvania
Bismarck, Anti-Semitism and the Tragedy of German Jewry
DATE: Monday, April 22nd
TIME: 8:00 PM
LOCATION: Parkway Central Library, Montgomery Auditorium (1901 Vine St., Philadelphia, PA)
( PLEASE NOTE THE CHANGE IN TIME AND LOCATION)
In 1880 the Prussian Lower House, the Landtag, debated the ‘Jewish Question’ as if thousands of German Jews had suddenly become no longer German. The wave of anti-semitic agitation and publications reached the highest level of society. Bismarck let it all happen and took no steps to counter the movement. Why he acted as he did in spite of his good relations with many prominent Jews shines a lurid light on Bismarck’s political tactics and marks the moment when the German Jewish community no longer felt safe.
Jonathan Steinberg is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Modern European History at the University of Pennsylvania, former Chair of the Department of History, and is an Emeritus Fellow, Trinity Hall, Cambridge. His most recent book, Bismarck. A Life (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 2011), was short-listed for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, June 2011 and short-listed for the Duff Cooper Prize in London, February 2012. The German edition with the title, Bismarck: Magier der Macht was published by Propyläen Verlag, an imprimatur of Ullstein Verlag of Berlin and is listed as a ‘bestseller’. Contracts have been signed for Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Romanian editions. The Danish edition published by Sohn of Copenhagen appeared in September 2012.
Book signing to follow; books provided by the Penn Book Center.
RSVP is required. To RSVP, please visit
http://jonathansteinbergbismarck.eventbrite.com/
For more information, please contact
Nari Baughman
nlinette@sas.upenn.edu
