Our Universities, Our Cities, Ourselves: A Webinar
Live from Berlin with historians Leslie M. Harris and Ariela Gross
It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both.… The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare. — James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
Join us Tuesday, March 26 at 12 noon eastern time for “Examining Our Universities, Our Cities, Ourselves”!
This week, the Hard Histories Lab and its guests are meeting in Berlin, hosted by the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Institute for Advanced Study. Our feature event is a live webinar with historians Ariela Gross (UCLA) and Leslie Harris (Northwestern) to talk about the complexities of how questions about history, memory, and reckoning surrounding legacies of racism and discrimination operate across and between national borders. As always, registration is easy and free, here.
We’ll talk about their work on university culture and memory, Dr. Harris at Emory University and Dr. Gross at the University of Southern California. We’ll explore how their research — Dr. Gross on slavery and memory in France and Dr. Harris on remember New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina — joins the past and the present. And we will ask them to reflect upon their time in Berlin where the histories and memories of World War II’s Nazi regime and Germany’s colonization in Africa both animate the city’s present day landscape.
(Some of) What We’re Reading While in Berlin:
Wikimedia Deutschland, “Open and Fair! Questions on how to handle digital copies of objects in collections from colonial contexts” (2021).
“How Does the Humboldt Forum Deal With Colonial Collections?”
Tiffany N. Florvil, Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (University of Illinois, 2020).
Ariela Julie Gross, “All Born to Freedom? Comparing the Law and Politics of Race and the Memory of Salvery in the U.S. and France,” 21 So. Cal. Interdisciplinary L. J. 522 (2012).
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies, eds, Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell and Alfred L. Brophy (University of Georgia Press, 2019.)
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2009.)
Jakob Vogel & Pap N’Diaye, “Der kolonialwissenschaftliche Unterricht an der Ecole libre de sciences politiques,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft un Unterricht (September-October 2023.)
James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton University Press, 2017).
— MSJ