Events Archive
2012–2013 | 2011–2012 | 2010–2011 | 2008–2009 | 2007–2008 | 2006–2007 | 2005–2006
2012–2013
“Philip Hale: Boston’s Consummate Critic”
Jon Mitchell, Professor of Performing Arts, UMass Boston
October 9, 2012
Philip Hale (1854-1934) was one of the greatest American music critics. Born in Norwich, Vermont, he studied law at Yale, and settled in Albany, New York. Soon thereafter he sacrificed his law career in order to pursue music. After a five-year period of study in Europe, Hale returned to Albany in 1887 and two years later established himself as music critic for a number of Boston periodicals, including the Boston Home Journal (1889-91), Boston Post (1890-91), Boston Journal (1891-1903), and finally the Boston Herald (1904-33), where he doubled as drama critic. From 1901 to 1933 he also served as program annotator for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. As writer and critic, Hale was a powerful and influential figure in the artistic life of Boston. The lecture includes details about Hale’s life, times, career, and his advocacy for (and disdain of) various composers, conductors, and soloists that appeared with the Boston Symphony and elsewhere.
“Rockefeller Public Health in Beijing in the 1920s & 1930s, and its Legacy”
Lecture: Darwin Stapleton, Professor and Director of the History M.A. Archives Track, U Mass Boston, Executive Director Emeritus, Rockefeller Archive Center
October 23, 2012
Lecture: At The Edge: New Americanist Pedagogy lecture co-sponsored by the RCUCH
"Oceanic American Studies"
Hester Blum, Associate Professor of English and Interim Associate Director, Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Pennsylvania State University
November 1, 2012
Conference: “No Prospect: Romanticism at the Edge”
Keynote Speaker: David Clark, Professor, Department of English and Cultural Studies Associate Member, Health Studies Programme McMaster University
November 2, 2012
Lecture: Alexia Yates
December 4th, 2012
“Seeing Like a Speculator: Real Estate in Nineteenth-century Paris"
From 1878 to 1884, Paris’s building industry experienced a spectacular boom. The financial networks and political climate of the early Third Republic enabled entrepreneurs to engage in unprecedented levels of speculation, producing a new class of market intermediaries that indelibly transformed property relationships in the capital. The activities of one particularly prolific developer from this period will serve as a case study through which to explore the intersection of business culture and built space in the construction of the modern metropolis. Unpacking the moral economy of real estate development, this talk will trace the emergence of a commercialized housing marketplace that increasingly constituted housing-seekers as consumers, property-ownership as a service, and housing itself as an exchangeable good.
Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at the Center for History and Economics, Harvard University
Room: Chancellor's Conference Room 3rd Floor Quinn Aministration Building
"Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418"
David Wallace, English Department, University of Pennsylvania
Response by David Areford, Art Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
September 21, 2011
"Byron's Head: Regency London, Radical Publishers and the Pirate Sphere"
Clara Tuite, English Department, University of Melbourne
September 26, 2011
"Replacing Home: From Primordial Hut to Digital Network in Contemporary Art"
Jennifer Johung, Art History Department, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
November 3, 2011
"Imperialism, Photography, and Modernist Form"
Emilio Sauri, English Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
November 10, 2011
"Locating Cinema: Why Place Matters"
Lakshmi Srinivas, Sociology Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
Response by Rajini Srikanth, English Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
November 30, 2011
2010–2011
“At Home in the Nineteenth-Century Marketplace: Sarah Forbes's ‘Private Family’”
Wendy Gamber, History Department, Indiana University, Bloomington
September 20, 2011
Urban Identity and the Atlantic Public Sphere
A conference sponsored by the Research Center for Urban Cultural History, University of Massachusetts, Boston
October 1-2, 2010
Documenting Cities Sympoisum: "The Great Recession: Impacts and Responses"
Organized by Keith Bentele, Sociology Department, University of Massachusetts, Boston
October 28, 2010
"Puritans, War, The Beaver and the Sea: the Maritime Crisis of 1628, and How It Gave Birth to New Boston"
Nick Bunker, Author of Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History
November 3, 2010
“Private Pleasures in Public Spaces: Purpose and Symbolism in the Music Rooms of Frederick ‘the Great,’ 1740 to 1765”
Mary Oleskiewicz, Performing Arts Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
November 10, 2010
“Animation in the Age of Anxiety”
Mike Dow, Art Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
November 15, 2010
"Leafing Around," An Ecohistory Event
Julie Patton, Artist
February 23, 2011
"Terror and Visual Culture" Symposium
University of Massachusetts, Boston
Lectures by Mike Dow, Art Deptartment, University of Massachusetts Boston: "Well, I Guess You Had to Be There: The Simpsons, Principal Skinner and the Collective Trauma of Vietnam," and Matthew Brown, English Department, University of Massachusetts, Boston: "Casement, Sebald, and the Idea of Universal Human Rights."
March 3, 2011
“Open City, Closed Space: Metropolitan Aesthetics in American Literature from Brown to DeLillo"
Stefan Brandt, Visiting Professor for North American Studies at the University of Siege
March 21, 2011
Annual Faculty Conference for Students: "Crime Stories"
Lectures by Robert Lublin, Performing Arts Department: "CSI 1551: The Lamentable and True Tragedy of M. Arden of Faversham," Leonard von Morze, English Department: "Hanging Fire: Hesitation in the Early American Gallows Confession," Alexander des Forges, Modern Languages Department: "From Shanghai Flowers (1892) to Shanghai Express (1935): Crime and (Extra)Territoriality," Louise Penner, English Department: "Crime in Mind: Charles Dickens Investigates," and Vincent Cannato, History Department: "Anti-Catholic Rioting and the 1834 Ursuline Convent Fire."
March 28, 2011
"The Aesthetics of Decay: An Anthropology of Historic Preservation in New Orleans"
Shannon Lee Dawdy, Anthropology Department, University of Chicago
Response by Lynnell Thomas, American Studies Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
April 14, 2011
2008–2009
The Betty and Matt Flaherty Lecture: "Route 66: Iconography of an American Highway”
Arthur Krim, Urban Historian
September 15, 2008
“Morality, the Public Sphere, and the Construction of Social Categories in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”
Woodruff Smith, History Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
September 29, 2008
RCUCH Urban Spaces Symposium: "Constraint and Mobility in the City"
Talks by Tyrone Simpson, Vassar College, Betsy Klimasmith, University of Massachusetts, Boston, Sarah Luria, Holy Cross College
October 6, 2008
"France, England and the Protestant Atlantic, c. 1580-1640"
Malcolm Smuts, History Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
October 20, 2008
Urban Ecohistory Symposium: Ecopoetics and Cultural History Symposium
Jonathan Skinner, Bates College, “Time, Extinction, Language: Poetry at the Wetlands Ecotone”; Bonnie Costello, Boston University, “Ecopoetics and the Pastoral Elegy”; Eve Corum, University of Massachusetts, Boston, “Prosodic Places: Geography and Meter in Hardy’s Elegies”; Patrick Barron, University of Massachusetts, Boston, Moderator
Documenting Cities Symposium: "City, Cindad, Ciudad, Cité: Teaching & Thinking Cities"
Presentations by University of Massachusetts, Boston honors students:
Gabriela Antunes (on Lisbon)
Eleanor Mooney (on Paris)
Michael Metzger (on Salem)
Moderated by Rajini Srikanth, Director, UMB Honors Program
November 10, 2008
First RCUCH Visiting Scholar
Ross Forman, Singapore University
November 17-18 2008
Urban Populations and Mobility Lecture: "Universal Omnivores and Universal Expositions: Chinese Food in Late 19th-Century Britain"
Ross Forman, Singapore University
November 17, 2008
Urban Populations and Mobility Symposium: "Gender, Trade, and Western Interventions in China"
Ross Forman, Singapore University, "British Perceptions of Chinese Torture"
Tracy Goode, History Dept, "Widowed Spanish Colonials and the Chinese Enclave on Manila"
Roberta Wollons, History Dept, "Women Missionaries in China,"
Nancy Berliner, Peabody-Essex Museum, "The Forbidden City"
November 18, 2008
"Proximate Antipathy versus Distant Empathy"
Rajini Srikanth, Honors Program and English Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
December 4, 2008
Urban Ecohistory Lecture: “Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place”
Film screening with talk by Henry Ferrini
February 27, 2009
"Whose 'Latin' Thing? The Spaces, Cultural Practices, and Discourses of the 1970s New York Salsa 'Boom'"
Marisol Negron, American Studies Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
March 30, 2009
Urban Spaces Symposium: "Terror: An Interdisciplinary Conference For University of Massachusetts, Boston Students"
Matthew Brown, English Department, ""Cities Under Watch: Belfast-Omagh"
Paul Bookbinder, History Department, “Nazi Germany and State Terror"
Patrick F. Clarkin, History Department, “The Terror of ‘Conventional’ War”
David Hunt, History Department, “Cold War Terrorists: Peasant Revolutionaries in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam”
Amani El Jack, Women's Studies Department, “Terrorizing Women: Rape as a War Weapon in Conflict Zones”
Ruth Miller, History Department, “Terror Without Agency”
March 25, 2009
Urban Populations and Mobility Lecture
Ruth Butler, Professor Emerita, discussing her book, Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cezanne, Monet, and Rodin (Yale University Press, 2008)
April 7, 2009
"20th-century Irish Literature"
Michael Jaros, Salem State
April 20, 2009
Urban Ecohistory Lecture: "Ladder to the Pleiades" and "The V.E.C.T.O.R.L.O.S.S. Project," from his current project, a book of environmental, place-based nonfiction tentatively titled "Home Work"
Michael Branch
April 28, 2009
2007–2008
The Betty and Matt Flaherty Lecture: "Ed Logue and the Building of New Boston: Renewing American Cities in the Era of Mass Suburbanization"
Lizabeth Cohen, Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies, Harvard University
September 10, 2007
“C. S. Peirce on the Job: Alexander Dallas Bache’s Nineteenth-Century American Research Revolution and its Legacy for the Composition Pedagogy of Urban Public Higher Education”
Neal Bruss, English Department, University of Massachusetts, Boston
October 15, 2007
Faculty Symposium: "Buried Memories: The Covering/ Uncovering/ Recovering of Urban Lived Experience"
Jean Humez, Women's Studies Department; David Landon, The Fiske Center; Luis Apontes-Pares, CPCS; Vincent Cannato, History Department; Shirley S. Tang, American Studies Department
November 2, 2007
“The Old Slavery and the New”
Thomas Johnson, History Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
November 14, 2007
"Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India"
Ananya Vajpeyi, History Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
March 31, 2008
"Intellectural History: Commerce, Character and Credit"
Leonard von Morze, English Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
April 28, 2008
Urban Spaces Lecture I: "Destruction Layer: Tracing Palestine Inside Israel"
Linda Dittmar, University of Massachusetts, Boston, Emeritus, English Department, and Deborah Bright, Rhode Island School of Design, Photography Department
February 29, 2008
Urban Spaces Lecture II: "Excavating the History of American Modern Architecture"
Gwendolyn Wright, Professor of Architecutre, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University
March 5, 2008
Urban Populations and Mobility Symposium: "Gender and Cultural Significance"
David Areford, Art Department
Chris Bobel, Women’s Studies Department
Betsy Klimasmith, English Department
Robert Lublin, English Department
Heike Schotten, Political Science Department
March 28, 2008
Urban Spaces Conference: "Cosmopolitan Culture, Consumption and the Making of Taste, 1600-1770"
Co-sponsored with the Confucious Institute
April 25-26, 2008
April 25: Coffee tasting by Peets Coffee, Chocolate tasting by Sparrow Chocolates. Plenaries by Marcy Norton, George Washington University and Brian Cowan, McGill University
April 26th: Plenaries by Linda Levy Peck, George Washington University and Kenneth Pomeranz, University of California Irvine. Panel talks by: Tamara Griggs, University of Chicago; Elizabeth Hyde, Kean University; Joanne Waley-Cohen, New York University; Timothy Brooks, Oxford University and University of British Columbia; Nancy Berliner, The Peabody Essex Museum.
2006–2007
The Betty and Matt Flaherty Lecture: "Gaining Ground in South Boston"
Dr. Nancy Seasholes
September 18, 2006
Documenting Cities Lecture: "Making Art Together: How Collaborative Art-Making Can Transform Kids, Classrooms, and Communities"
Mark Cooper, Boston College
September 26, 2006
"Saint Charles Borromeo’s Self-Fashioning"
Pam Jones, Art Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
October 23, 2006
Urban Spaces Symposium: "Urban Green Spaces, Buried Memory"
William Clendaniel, President of Mt. Auburn Cemetery
Susan Wilson, independent author and photographer
Alan Banks, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site
Patrick Barron, scholar and photographer, English Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
Barbara Lewis, Trotter Institute
Joan Gardner, GIS Core Research Facility
October 26, 2006
Documenting Cities Lecture: "Boston Firsts: 40 Feats of Innovations and Invention that Happened First in Boston and Helped Make America Great (2006)"
Linda Morganroth, author
November 10, 2006
"The Introduction to Political Culture, State Formation and the Problem of Religious War in Britain, c. 1580-1642"
Malcolm Smuts, History Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
November 20, 2006
"Later 19th-century Ireland"
John White, GCOE
December 4, 2006
Documenting Cities Lecture: "Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919"
Stephen Puleo, author and University of Massachusetts, Boston alum
February 22, 2007
"Narrating No Man's Land in Parade's End"
Eve Sorum, English Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
February 26, 2007
Urban Spaces Symposium: "Built Spaces: Museums and Their Publics"
Roundtable Discussion by:
Katie Getchell, MFA
Dan Monroe, Peabody Essex Museum
Paul Bessire, ICA
Tom Putnam, JFK Library and Museum
Anne Emerson, Boston Museum
With Scholarly Response by Andrew McClellan, Tufts University, and Roundtable Moderation by Paul Tucker, Art Department, University of Massachusetts, Boston
February 27, 2007
“Re/Genderings: A Feminist Reading of Race and Nation Within a Global Economy”
Elora Chowdhury, Women's Studies Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
March 26, 2007
"The Spatial Constructions of Terror and Terrorism"
Matthew Brown, English Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
April 23, 2007
Documenting Cities Conference: "The Documenting Cities Hypermedia Conference"
John Maciuika, Baruch College, Hypermedia Berlin
Sumeeta Srinivasan, Harvard University, The China Project
Anne Sauer, Tufts University and Ann Vosikas, The Bostonian Society; Boston Streets: Mapping Directory Data
Eve Blau, Harvard University, Project Zagreb: The City as Open Work
Nancy Stieber, University of Massachusetts, Boston, The Amsterdam Image Database
Roundtable Moderator: Malcolm Smuts, History Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
April 27, 2007
The Flaherty Urban Cultural History Student Award
Inauguration of this prize. A $500 prize for the best undergraduate project in the CLA on or relating to urban cultural history.
Urban Populations and Mobility Series: RCUCH and Theatre Arts Performance of Fanny Burney's "The Witlings"
May 3-9, 2007
2005–2006
First Urban Cultural Winter Faculty Symposium
Plenaries by Ann Blair, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, Harvard University (“Tracking Intellectual Footsoldiers in Early Modern Europe: Reflections on Praxis and Method in Centers of Print Culture”) and Tilottama Rajan, Canada Research Chair in English and Theory, Western Ontario, University of Western Ontario (“The Prose of the World: Romanticism, the Nineteenth Century, and the Reorganization of Knowledge”). Faculty presentations on research, teaching and service using urban cultural history by: Nancy Stieber, Art Department, Ana Aparicio, Anthropology Department, Alex Des Forges, Modern Languages Department, Judy Smith, American Studies Department, Woodruff Smith, History Department
February 25, 2005
Establishment of the Research Center for Urban Cultural History
January 2006
Second RCUCH Winter Faculty Symposium
University of Massachusetts, Boston Faculty Presenters:
Corinne Etienne, Applied Linguistics Department
Robert Johnson, Africana Studies Department
Robert Lublin, Performing Arts Department
Cheryl Nixon, English Department
Shirley Tang, American Studies and Asian Studies Departments
Gretchen Umholtz, Classics Department
February 26, 2006
"The Return of Pierre Proudhon: Property rights, crime, and the rules of law"
Esther Kingston-Mann, History Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
April 10, 2006
Urban Spaces Lecture: Slide lecture based on book, Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston (MIT Press, 2002)
Nancy Seasholes, Urban Historian
April 21, 2006
Documenting Cities Mapping Project Exhibition
Poster Presentation by Project Team, Eve Sorum, RCUCH Post-Doctorate; Amber La Piana, English MA Program; Andy, History MA Program
April 24-28, 2006
Urban Green Spaces Lecture: Reading from book, The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Memory, and Justice in the Gardens of Ethnic America (Beacon Press, 2006)
Patricia Klindienst, author
May 1, 2006
