All events to be held:
Wednesdays, noon
IASH Conference Room (LN 1106)

Upcoming IASH Fellows Speaker Series
Fall 2019

September 11, 2019
IASH Fellows Speaker Series: "The Technical Production of Affect: Renovating the Rothko Chapel"
Presented by: Pamela Smart (Art History)

September 18, 2019
IASH Fellows Speaker Series: "The Colony Within: Excremental Medicine and the Politics of Race in the United States"
Presented by: Matthew Wolf-Meyer (Anthropology)

September 25, 2019
IASH Fellows Speaker Series: "Fragile Masculinity in the Time of #Metoo”
Presented by: Amrita De (Comparative Literature)

October 2, 2019
IASH Fellows Speaker Series: "Welcome to La Amerika: Linguistic Assimilation of the Sephardim"
Presented by: Bryan Kirschen (Romance Languages)

October 16, 2019
IASH Fellows Speaker Series:  “Railroads and Agricultural Development in Antebellum Northern Virginia”
Presented by:  Jason Tercha (History)
In the 1850s, Virginians witnessed a surge in railroad development across the state’s northeastern counties. Railroad companies, such as the Manassas Gap and the Orange and Alexandria, extended lines from the Potomac River across the piedmont. These companies largely drew financial support from state and local governments and from a long list of local shareholders, many of whom were from the farming class.
This presentation investigates the representation of the farming class in railroad stock ownership. It employs data-driven approaches of the digital humanities to analyze census and tax records alongside corporate stock subscription lists. This approach underscores the diversity of the farming class – due to differences in wealth, occupation, gender, and race – as a means to identify and analyze the local contingencies of railroad development. It moves beyond simple dichotomies in our understanding of the political economy to assess the economic volatility and destabilizing features of capitalist development.

October 30, 2019
IASH Fellows Speaker Series: “Ecology and the rise of capitalism”
Presented by: Jason Moore (Sociology)

November 13, 2019
IASH Fellows Speaker Series: “The Show Must Go On: Disciplining Theatre Professionals”
Presented by: David Bisaha (Theatre)
A 1947 “Theatre Workers’ Code of Ethics” exists among the papers of actor Kathleen Freeman. From simple rules such as “I shall never miss a performance” to the more abstract “I shall forego the gratification of my ego” and “I shall never lose my enthusiasm for theatre because of disappointments,” Freeman wrote a rare list of unspoken ideologies for theatre work. Today such attitudes are summed up as “professionalism,” a concept both aspirational and descriptive. This presentation considers the influence of professional ideology across types of theatre workers at a time in which the US theatre industry was negotiating modern labor paradigms. It studies the ways in which professionalism has been used as a gold standard for successful artistry, and finds that professional rhetoric preserves oppositions between artistry and labor that elevate art and self-sacrifice.

November 20, 2019
IASH Graduate Public Humanities Fellows Presentation: 
"Writing for Recovery in the Southern Tier" and "Untold Stories and Diasporic Voices"
Presented by: Benjamin Burghauser (English) and Debarati Roy (English)