The Ohio State University Center for Historical Research
2021-2023 Series
Historians study trajectories of change through time. We are concerned with the pace and causes of change and we are concerned with its experiential impact and societal outcomes. And sometimes change accelerates, in a swirl of dynamic interactions that take us by surprise, leading us out of routines into unfamiliar spaces.
The CHR presented a two-year series on the problem of crisis in history. This series was launched in the spring of 2020 by the sudden challenges and uncertainties in our recent and ongoing experience with the Covid-19 pandemic: our opening conversations revolved around the sudden impact of epidemic disease but soon broadened out into a consideration of the more general nature of crisis. Since our first conversations the explosive sequence of events unfolding with the death of George Floyd, the 2020 election, global fires and floods attributed to anthropogenic climate warming, and most recently the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan have made our inquiry into the dynamics of crisis all the more pressing. We hope that with this series the public and academy will want to engage in an assessment of our longer moment of crisis, and to situate in into a sequence of conditions, impacts, and consequences: what we might call the “before, during, and after” of the events of 2020-2021. We hope that our presentations over these two years helped with this assessment of these recent experiences, as well as those of people in moments of crisis in times past.
SPRING 2023:
Friday, Feb. 17, 2023: Edward Foley, Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University
“The Unrepresentativeness of American Elections: How the United States Developed Electoral Structures that Defeat the Preferences of the Electorate”
Read the abstract.
Watch the video or listen to the podcast here.
Event co-sponsored by the Mershon Center for International Security Studies.
Friday, Feb. 24, 2023: Adia Benton, Cultural Anthropology, Northwestern University
“On Pandemic Potential”
Read the abstract.
(Video of this presentation is not available.)
Event co-sponsored by the College of Public Health and the Department of African American and African Studies.
Friday, April 7, 2023: Dorothy Noyes, Distinguished Professor of English, Professor of Comparative Studies, and Director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University
“Exemplary rescue? Volodymyr Zelensky and the Crisis of the Liberal International Order”
Read the abstract.
Watch the video or listen to the podcast here.
Friday, April 14, 2023: Ling Zhang, History, Boston College
“Seventy Meters Below Is My Home: Geotrauma and Earthly Memories of East China”
Read the abstract.
Watch the video or listen to the podcast here.
Event co-sponsored by the Institute for Chinese Studies, the East Asian Studies Center, and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies.
AUTUMN 2022
Friday, Sept. 16, 2022: Joseph Manning, Classics, History, and Law, Yale University
“Climate and Society from Egypt to India to China: A Regional Crisis at 160BCE?”
Followed by a comment by James Stagge, Civil Environmental and Geodetic Engineering, Ohio State University.
Read the abstract.
View video of talk or listen to the podcast
Event co-sponsored by the Departments of Classics and Anthropology, the College of Earth Science, Center for East Asian Studies, and the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center.
Friday, Oct. 7, 2022: Sarah Muir, Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center
“When Crisis Becomes Routine: Notes from Argentina, 2001-2022.”
View video of talk or listen to the podcast
Read the abstract.
Sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies and the Department of Anthropology.
Friday, Oct 28, 2022: Bedour Alagraa, African and African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas at Austin. Visiting Research Scholar, Princeton University, 2022-2023.
“Bad Infinities: Catastrophe and its ‘Changing Same’.”
[This talk was not filmed.]
Read the abstract.
Event co-sponsored by the Department of African and African American Studies
Friday, Nov. 18, 2022: Serhy Yekelchyk, History and Germanic & Slavic Studies, University of Victoria
“The Long Prehistory of Russia’s War against Ukraine”
View video of talk or listen to the podcast
Read the abstract.
Event co-sponsored by the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the Department of Political Science.
SPRING 2022
Media & Materiality: Category Crisis and Transitional Moments in East Asia and Eastern Europe Symposium
Thursday, March 3rd – Saturday, March 5th, 2022
Read the description. Download the Program.
This event is cosponsored by the OSU Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme, the CHR, the Department of History, the East Asian Center, and the Slavic, East European and Eurasian Center.
Friday, January 21, 2022 – Michael Berry, Professor, Modern Chinese Literature and Film, UCLA;
“Translation Diary: Disinformation Campaigns, US-China Relations, and COVID19.”
Read the abstract.
Video of this presentation is available here.
Listen to the podcast version on Soundcloud or Anchor.fm.
Co-sponsored with the Institute of Chinese Studies.
Friday, February 11, 2022 – Jacob Soll, Professor and Professor of Philosophy, History and Accounting at the University of Southern California
“Crisis, Accounting, and Accountability in the French Revolution.”
Read the abstract.
Friday, February 25, 2022 – Julia Keblinska, The East Asian/Slavic, East European and Eurasian CHR Crisis Post-Doctoral Fellow:
“Genres of Crisis: Cinema at the Brink of Postsocialism”
Read the abstract.
Friday, March 25, 2022 – Stephen Kern, Humanities Distinguished Professor, Department of History, Ohio State University
Chris Otter, Department of History (commentator)
“Pace in the Internet Age”
Read the abstract.
Video of this talk is available here.
Listen to the podcast version on Soundcloud or Anchor.fm.
AUTUMN 2021
Friday, September 10, 2021 – Roberto Barrios, Professor of Anthropology, University of New Orleans
“A Crisis for Whom? Epistemologies, Historiographies, and Praxis in Times of Upheaval”
Read the abstract.
View a video of this presentation.
Listen to the podcast version of this talk on Soundcloud or Anchor.fm.
This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology.
Friday, October 1, 2021 – Robin Wagner-Pacifici, University Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research
“Double Exposure: Pandemic and Protest in 2020”
Read the abstract.
View a video of this presentation.
Professor Wagner-Pacifici is the author of What Is an Event? (Chicago, 2017)
This event is co-sponsored by the Ohio State University Office of Diversity
Friday, October 22, 2021 – Chad Wellmon, Univ. of Virginia and Paul Reitter, Ohio State Univ., in conversation with Ying Zhang, Ohio State Univ.
“Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age”
Read the abstract.
View a video of this presentation. (Available for a limited time.)
Friday, October 29, 2021 – Anna Tsing, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz
“Is the Anthropocene amenable to historical analysis? Feral Atlas for historians”
Read the abstract.
View a video of this presentation.
Listen to the podcast version on Soundcloud or Anchor.fm.
This event is co-sponsored by the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme and the Department of Anthropology.
Friday, November 19, 2021 – Geoffrey Parker, Andreas Dorpalen Professor of European History and Associate of the Mershon Center, Ohio State University
and Adam Izdebski, Independent Research Group Leader, Palaeo-Science and History Research Group, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
“Climate Change, Crisis, and Resilience in The Pre-Modern World”
Read the abstract.
View a video of this presentation.
Listen to the podcast version of this talk on Soundcloud or Anchor.fm.
CHR-Crisis Steering Committee:
Sara Butler, History, CHR Director
John Brooke, History, Series Chair
Joan Cashin, History
Jeffrey Cohen, Anthropology
Amy Fairchild, Dean of Public Health
Anthony Kaldellis, Classics
Peter Mansoor, History
Dorothy Noyes, English and Comparative Studies
Chris Otter, History
Paul Reitter, Germanic Languages and Literatures
Tina Sessa, History
Jennifer Siegel, History
Sarah Van Beurden, History
Ying Zhang, History
Please send any inquiries regarding this program to John Brooke, brooke.10@osu.edu.