The Crossroads of Empire
2010 Lecture Series
How might we reimagine race, place, and empire in U.S. and world history? This lecture series, organized by the Pacific Borderlands group, showcases scholarship in the growing
fields of borderland studies and the Pacific world. Designed to bridge disciplinary and institutional
boundaries these talks offer an opportunity to think about the trans-Pacific connections that have
shaped the borderlands.
"Can You See Me? Rock, Race, and the Social Geography of the Jimi Hendrix Experience"
Matthew Frye Jacobson,
Yale University
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
4:00 p.m.
Communications 120
Matthew Frye Jacobson is Professor of American Studies and History at Yale University. His many books include Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998), Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (2000), and Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (2006).
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, Simpson Center for the Humanities, Hilen Endowment for American Literature and Culture, and Experience Music Project.
"Delusions of Empire: The Imagined America of William McKendree Gwin"
Rachel St. John,
Harvard University
Thursday, March 4, 2010
4:00 p.m.
Communications 226
Rachel St. John is Associate Professor of History at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on the history of the U.S. West, environment, borderlands, and nineteenth-century North America. She is the author of Line in the Sand: The Western U.S.-Mexico Border, 1848-1934 (Princeton University Press, forthcoming). This talk stems from her new book project on “The Imagined States of America: Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century North America.”
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest and the Simpson Center for the Humanities.
"The Imperial Comanches and the Dark Matter of History"
Pekka Hämäläinen,
University of California, Santa Barbara
Thursday, April 22, 2010
4:00 p.m.
Communications 226
Pekka Hämäläinen is Associate Professor of History at University of California at Santa Barbara where he teaches North American borderlands and Native American history. He is the author of The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press, 2008), winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Merle Curti Award, the Norris and Carol Hundley Award, the Caughey Prize, and the Recognition of Excellence of the Cundill International Prize in History. He is currently a fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest and the Simpson Center for the Humanities.
"Empire and the Making of Nations: The Panama Canal's Construction and the History of the Americas"
Julie Greene,
University of Maryland
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
4:00 p.m.
Communications 226
Julie Greene is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, where she specializes in U.S. labor and working-class history. Greene is the author of Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881 to 1917 (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal (Penguin Press, 2009).
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest and the Simpson Center for the Humanities.