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Events

Intellectual collaborations thrive in environments where ideas are shared, freely and respectfully, among people representing different backgrounds and perspectives. This is why the Neubauer Collegium regularly opens its inquiries and conversations to the public.

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The Silk Road and the Rhetoric of Connected History

Lecture

The Silk Road and the Rhetoric of Connected History

At this lecture Tamara Chin will discuss the narratives that modern historians crafted to explain complex interactions across Asia.

In the second event for the Silk Road Imaginaries project at the Neubauer Collegium, Tamara Chin (Brown University) will share work from her book manuscript The Silk Road Spirit and the Modern Human Sciences, 1870–1970, in which she argues that the modern colonial encounter in and around China prompted unprecedented interest in the connected past. Chin will discuss the narrative frameworks and tropes that modern historians in East Asia, South Asia, and East Africa introduced over the period 1870–1970 for the systematic study of historical contact, showing the profoundly local figurations of the connected past for diverse histories of colonialism, enslavement, and religion. Prasenjit Duara (Duke University) will serve as the respondent.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago with support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the U.S. Department of Education.


About the Speakers

Tamara Chin is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. She is the author of Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard, 2014).

Prasenjit Duara is the Oscar Tang Chair of East Asian Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford, 1988), Rescuing History from the Nation (University of Chicago, 1995), Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Rowman, 2003), and The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge, 2014).

Neubauer Collegium
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The Price Is Wrong: Why the Market Will Never Solve the Climate Crisis

Lecture

The Price Is Wrong: Why the Market Will Never Solve the Climate Crisis

At this talk, geographer Brett Christophers will explore the barriers to green investment and propose alternative strategies.

Lecture by Brett Christophers (Uppsala University), with interlocutor Jo Guldi (Emory University)

What if our understanding of capitalism and climate is back to front? What if the problem is not that transitioning to renewables is too expensive, but that saving the planet is not sufficiently profitable? This is the claim Brett Christophers makes in his new book, The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet (Verso 2024). At this talk, Christophers will show that the global economy is moving too slowly toward sustainability because the return on green investment is too low. Today's consensus is that the key to curbing climate change is to produce green electricity and electrify everything possible. The main economic barrier in that project has seemingly been removed. But while prices of solar and wind power have tumbled, the golden era of renewables has yet to materialize. The problem is that investment is driven by profit, not price, and operating solar and wind farms remains a marginal business, dependent everywhere on the state's financial support. We cannot expect markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis while the profits that are their lifeblood remain unappetizing. But there is an alternative to providing surrogate green profits through subsidies: to take energy out of the private sector's hands.

Presented by the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU), in affiliation with the Economic Planning and Democratic Politics project at the Neubauer Collegium.

1155 E. 60th St., Room 344
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Cultures of Restitution: Decolonial Histories, Justice, and the Museum

Workshop

Cultures of Restitution: Decolonial Histories, Justice, and the Museum

This workshop brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners to discuss the challenges of post-colonial restitution claims.

“Cultural restitution” is often understood as a set of policies and practices that act on cultural objects: museum artworks that are returned from one country to another, for example. But cultural restitution is also a tremendously creative field, which itself produces cultural life: new languages, new forms of knowledge production, new communities of interest, new works of art. This workshop brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and practitioners working with colonial and postcolonial heritage to inquire into these cultures of restitution, to delineate their histories, and to understand their capacity to shape new worlds.

The workshop will culminate in an artist talk by Chidi Nwaubani, a co-founder of the artist collective Looty, which has experimented with the "digital repatriation" to Africa of looted objects housed in Western museums. (Anyone can attend Nwaubani’s talk, regardless of whether they attend other parts of the workshop.)

A recent Pozen News article previewed how panel participants will approach the topic of restitution.

VIEW THE SCHEDULE >

Co-sponsored by the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry and the Pozen Center for Human Rights, in partnership with the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.

Neubauer Collegium
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Textual Amulets of the Mediterranean World: 1000 BCE - 1000 CE

Conference

Textual Amulets of the Mediterranean World: 1000 BCE - 1000 CE

At this conference, a group of international scholars will explore the relationship between text and image on a set of ancient amulets.

People in pre-modern cultures wore many objects on their bodies as amulets, such as roots, seashells, or carved images. But at different points in time all of the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean began to inscribe prayers and charms on linen, papyrus, gold foil, or gemstones, and to use them as amulets. At this conference, a group of international scholars will ask and try to answer numerous questions about what happens at this point of transition and why. Does the more permanent nature of a text imply its continual presence, ever repeating? Were textual amulets created and used by literate elites alone? What is the relationship between text and image on amulets? If gods previously listened to prayers, when did they learn to read? This conference stems from a larger project to publish a representative collection of textual amulets from across the Mediterranean and throughout antiquity, facilitating the study of the various traditions, their connections, and transformations.

This conference will be available on livestream via Zoom on May 9 and May 10.

DOWNLOAD THE SCHEDULE


PARTICIPANTS
Clifford Ando (University of Chicago)
Anke Ilona Blöbaum (Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig)
Korshi Dosoo (University of Würzburg)
Rivka Elitzur-Leiman (Fordham University; Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow)
Christopher Faraone (University of Chicago)
Anthony Kaldellis (University of Chicago)
Carolina López-Ruiz (University of Chicago)
Margaret Mitchell (University of Chicago)
Árpád Nagy (University of Pécs, Hungary)
Megan Nutzman (Old Dominion University)
Madadh Richey (Brandeis University)
Joe Sanzo (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice; Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow)
Panagiota Sarischouli (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Sofia Torallas Tovar (University of Chicago)
Erin Walsh (University of Chicago)
Michael Zellmann-Rohrer (Macquarie University / Freie Universität Berlin)

This conference is presented by the Textual Amulets of the Mediterranean World research project at the Neubauer Collegium in partnership with the Divinity School and Classics Department at the University of Chicago.

Neubauer Collegium
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