Spring 2008 Events
Spring 2008 2007-08 Lecture Series
Race and Rights in the 18th and 19th Centuries
Navigating the Past: Slavery, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and Brown University
Date: Monday, February 18, 2008; 7 pm
Location: 107 EPB
Presenter: James Campbell, Professor of American Studies and Africana Studies, Brown University and Chair of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice
Co-sponsors: 18th- and 19th-Century Studies, International Programs, Departments of American Studies, English, and History, African Studies Program, American Studies, Caribbean, Diaspora, and Atlantic Studies, Center for Human Rights
In 2003, Brown University President Ruth Simmons appointed a Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. The committee of faculty members, undergraduate and graduate students, and administrators was charged to investigate and report on the University’s historical relationship to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. It was also asked help the campus and the nation reflect on the meaning of this history and on the complex historical, political, legal, and moral questions posed by any present-day confrontation with past injustice. Beginning with the committee’s discovery of a detailed ship’s log of the founding family’s disastrous expedition to capture slaves in Africa to the conversion of one family member to the anti-slavery movement, the Committee’s “report” traces a path from a violent past to a new spirit of public engagement. The extensive archive produced by this dramatic example of “public scholarship” can be seen online http://www.brown.edu/Research/Slavery_Justice/.
Nature, Ideal, and Caricature:
The Perception of Physical Types by Early Anthropologists
Date: Monday, April 21, 2008;
7 pm
Location: Room 116 Art Building West
Presenter: Martial Guedron, Professor of Art History, UFR Sciences Historiques/Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, France
Co-Sponsors: 18th- and 19th-Century Studies, International Programs, Department of French and Italian, School of Art and Art History, European Studies Group, Center for Human Rights
People of color often first circulated in Europeans’ orbit through words and images produced by anthropologists. These anthropological images arose at the intersection of aesthetic criteria, scientific accounts of human differences, and racial prejudices in 18th-century physiognomic arguments about the “look” of race. These same systems of representation then circulated even more widely and damagingly in the innumerable caricatures of the period, yet another form of “physiognomic procedure.”