Conversation with the author

Join us for an online conversation with historian of medicine Christina Ramos about her newly published book Bedlam in the New World: A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment.
 
Discussants: 
Adam Warren, University of Washington 
Elizabeth O'Brien, John Hopkins University

Introduction available at https://uncpress.org/book/9781469666570/bedlam-in-the-new-world/

Click here to view poster for this event.

Returning Home: Repatriation of Jewish Books Confiscated During WWII

In 2021, the Library of the Jewish Museum in Prague contacted Washington University Libraries to learn more about books in the Brisman Collection of Jewish Studies bearing the book stamp of the Library of the Jewish Religious Community in Prague. Both institutions worked together to prove that the books had been confiscated by the Nazis during World War II and to repatriate these stolen items to their rightful home.

From 4-5:30 pm, Hillel Kieval, Anika Walke, and Cassie Brand will give short presentations discussing Jewish books in the context of World War II and the process of repatriation, followed by a conversation moderated by Erin McGlothlin. A reception will follow the discussion.

Environmental Studies Knight Distinguished Lecture - Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

Professor Demuth is an environmental historian specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interest in northern environments and cultures began when she was 18 and moved north of the Arctic Circle in the Yukon. For over two years, she mushed huskies, hunted caribou, fished for salmon, tracked bears, and otherwise learned to survive in the taiga and tundra. In the years since, she has lived in and studied Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America. From the archive to the dog sled, she is interested in how the histories of people, ideas, places, and non-human species intersect. 

Juneteenth Keynote: From New Orleans to Galveston to St. Louis and Beyond

Join us for a riveting nine-generation family migration story from Texas to Missouri. Vanessa Slaughter, a native St. Louisan, will join Jim Vincent of the St.  Louis African American History & Genealogy Society in a fireside chat to trace her family’s legacy to Galveston, Texas, in  the 1860s. Each generation builds on the foundation of love, community, and freedom to give us inspiration to dig into our own family histories and celebrate Juneteenth as a community. The  evening will kick off with a brief presentation about the history and meaning of the Juneteenth holiday by Dr. Geoff K. Ward of Washington University in St. Louis and will end with a live performance by the Community Gospel Choir of St. Louis, inspiring us to look deep into our own family legacies of migration, freedom, and community love.

Techniques and Aims of Isaac Newton’s Alchemy

While Isaac Newton is considered a hero of the so-called Enlightenment, a period widely regarded as breaking with the “superstitions” of the earlier medieval period, he is also sometimes referred to as the last of the alchemists. What was Isaac Newton trying to accomplish in the nearly forty years that he devoted to alchemy?  Was he engaged in a single-minded quest for the philosophers’ stone, or in an attempt to find mystical enlightenment, or even in a way of expanding his natural philosophy into new areas of research?  

By examining the records of Newton’s alchemical experimentation and replicating a number of his processes in the laboratory, historian William Newman hopes to arrive at a solution to these and other questions surrounding the famous physicist’s alchemical quest. Co-sponsored by Bernard Becker Medical Library.

Presentation will be from 4–5 pm in Olin Library, Room 142, followed by a reception in the Ginkgo Room from 5–6 pm. 

Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust

ANNUAL HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL LECTURE

From concentration camps to the murder sites of mobile shooting squads, Jews and Roma experienced Nazi persecution in close proximity to each other. Yet, after the war, the world recognized the injustices both groups faced differently. While Jewish persecution histories became memorialized in museums, monuments, and college courses, the international community largely ignored the Roma genocide. How should we tell the story of the Holocaust in light of this unequal treatment? How have relations between Jews and Roma—from the 1930s to the present—influenced the way we think about Nazi racial persecution?

Tracing the stories of many Romani and Jewish victims, survivors, historians, and activists, Ari Joskowicz vividly describes the experiences of Hitler’s forgotten victims and charts the evolving postwar relationship between Roma and Jews over the course of nearly a century. During the Nazi era, Jews and Roma shared little in common besides their simultaneous persecution. Yet the decades of entwined struggles for recognition have deepened Romani-Jewish relations. They now center not only on commemorations of past genocides or compensation practices but also on contemporary debates about antiracism and the future of democracy.

About the speaker

Ari Joskowicz is chair of Jewish Studies, associate professor of Jewish studies and European studies, and associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University. As a historian of modern Jewish and European history, he is especially interested in the interplay between Jewish history and transnational minority politics since the Enlightenment. 

His new book, Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2023), traces the unlikely entanglement of the histories of Jews and Romanies throughout the 20th century, focusing on Western and Central Europe as well as the United States and Israel. Jews and Roma died side by side in the Holocaust, yet the world did not recognize their destruction equally. In the years and decades following the war, the Jewish experience of genocide increasingly occupied the attention of legal experts, scholars, educators, curators and politicians, while the genocide of Europe’s Roma went largely ignored. Rain of Ash is the untold story of how Roma turned to Jewish institutions, funding sources, and professional networks as they sought to gain recognition and compensation for their wartime suffering.

Follow this link for more information on the Holocaust Memorial Lecture.