Past Events

Inventing counterfactual histories — such as a Europe that never threw off Hitler, or a second term for JFK — is a common pastime of modern day historians. Gallagher probes how counterfactual history works and to what ends.

Masiello explores the textual and visual representation of the senses during moments of crisis in Latin America from the early nineteenth century to the present.

Patricia Williams is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University. A scholar of race, gender, and law, she is a prolific writer across a variety of genres. Her books include The Alchemy of Race and Rights and Open House: Of Family, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Own. She is a columnist for the Nation.

Exploring the idea of "intimations" - social interactions that approach outright communication but do not quite reach it - G. R. F. (John) Ferrari offers a new framework for understanding different ways in which we communicate with each other.

In his study of the coevolution of radio and the novel in Argentina, Cuba, and the United States, McEnaney explores how novelists in the radio age transformed realism as they struggled to channel and shape popular power.

Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information — but this was not always the case. Sweet Science explores how Romantic poetry served as an important tool for scientific inquiry.

In the first book-length study of Jan Brueghel, Pieter’s son, Professor of History of Art Elizabeth Honig reveals how the artist’s tiny detail-filled paintings questioned conceptions of distance, dimension, and style.

A preview screening of Koerner's documentary film The Burning Child followed by Q+A with the director.

A panel of scholars join Harvard art historian Joseph Leo Koerner to discuss the role of art in a society in which freedom is radically curtailed.

Joseph Koerner examines Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Delights — approaching the painting as a representation of a world without history and without law.