Resident Fellows Speaker Series
The Hall Center's Resident Fellows give lunchtime talks about their works-in-progress. These events are public and open to all in the Hall Center's Conference Hall. Lunch is provided, and RSVP is required.
‘Instrument of Reproduction’: Anti-Lynching Stories and the Early Birth Control Movement
Aimee Wilson (Associate Professor, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies)
WED MAR 12, 12:00 PM
Hall Center Conference Hall
RSVP online by March 5
The birth control movement in the United States has been rightly criticized for its embrace of eugenics and other racist ideas in its early days, and for its failure to grapple with that legacy today. This criticism succeeded in getting Planned Parenthood, which grew out of Margaret Sanger’s activism, to distance itself from Sanger due to her racism. There is an underexplored side to the story: the significant and complicated role that Black women and men played in the early birth control movement. This presentation will focus on a short story published in the Birth Control Review magazine in 1919 by Angelina Weld Grimké, an anti-lynching activist and grandniece to abolitionist Angelina Grimké Weld. Using the story as a case study, this presentation will explore how Black authors and activists attempted to shape a movement that was responsive to women of all races, and will consider why the movement failed to embrace that goal.
Transatlantic (Re)Visions of the World: The Many Versions of Alexander Fraser Tytler’s Elements of General History
Stephen Jackson (Assistant Professor, Educational Leadership and Policy Studies)
WED MAR 26, 12:00 PM
Hall Center Conference Hall
RSVP online by March 19
In the late 18th and early 19th century, before the Common Schools Movement took root, American educational reformers increasingly called for history teaching in the schools. To date, many scholars have focused on the development of American history teaching, but there has been comparatively little attention to how early Americans taught the history of the world. This talk explores this topic through the influential work of Alexander Fraser Tytler and the subsequent revisions of his Elements of General History. At stake is a central question: How did a conservative Royalist member of the Scottish aristocracy become one of the most widely used world history textbook authors in the early American Republic, assigned for decades at Harvard and Yale Universities as well as seminaries and academies across the United States? The revisions made to Tytler’s work shed light on early American views of world history and America’s place within it.
The First Line of Defense: Nike Missiles, Black Soldiers, and Housing Discrimination, 1958-1966
Titus Firmin (Sias Graduate Fellow, History)
THU APR 24, 12:00 PM
Hall Center Conference Hall
RSVP online by April 17
During the 1950s-60s, U.S. Nike anti-aircraft missile batteries served as the first line of defense against Soviet nuclear threats. The Army deployed 130 Nike sites near major cities, requiring missileers to live within 15 minutes of their posts. With no housing provided, Congress authorized leasing homes in civilian neighborhoods. After Army desegregation in 1954, Black missileers faced housing discrimination, excluded from segregated white neighborhoods near their assignments. This undermined their military effectiveness and national security. Army leaders condoned such discrimination in practice, and Black missileers responded by working with civil rights groups and politicians. Their efforts led the Secretary of Defense to intervene, prompting one of the largest Army-led fair housing campaigns before the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Housing discrimination in the Nike program highlighted the intersection of civil rights and national defense, placing Black soldiers on the front lines of both struggles.
Landscape, Dominion, and the Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern Italy (1300-1600)
Areli Marina (Associate Professor, Art History)
MON MAY 5, 12:00 PM
Hall Center Conference Hall
RSVP online by April 28
At the dawn of the early modern period, two enterprises dominated the attention of the lords of northern Italy: establishing a continuous territorial dominion across the Italian landscape and persuading contemporaries of the existence and importance of these new domains by visual, material, and textual means. This talk explores little-known experiments in the representation of landscape and dominion created before the establishment of modern European cartography and the development of landscape as a formal painting genre. These precocious artifacts illuminate how Italian lords and local image-makers used novel visual and material strategies to materialize evolving concepts of space, power, and belonging. These representations were active agents in constructing spatial understanding and political legitimacy. Bridging art history, political geography, and cultural studies, the talk offers a perspective on how these landscape images and early maps did far more than simply document territory—they were complex tools of political negotiation and cultural storytelling.