Events

David Scott, Ruth and William Lubic Professor (Columbia University), will be delivering the 2024-2025 John Hope Franklin Lecture on March 4 at 4:30 pm in the John Hope Franklin Room (SSRB 224). He will be joined in conversation by Adom Getachew, Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity (University of Chicago). 

We are pleased to announce that the 2024-25 Shapiro Initiative on Environment and Society Distinguished Lecture will be offered by Bathsheba Demuth on April 2, 2025 at 5:00 pm in the John Hope Franklin Room (SSRB 224). 

Her talk, “History from the Dogsled: Animals, Climates, and the Stakes of Telling the Past,” examines how something as seemingly unlikely as animal emotions helped shape the contours of the British and Russian empires as they attempted to colonize what is now Alaska and makes an argument for the stakes of reading the past for new kinds of subjectivity, affect, and action—for new definitions of what and who counts as part of how history is made.

Demuth is the Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society, Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University. Her work focuses on the environmental history of the Russian and North American Arctic and she is author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, published by W. W. Norton (2019). Demuth completed her PhD in history at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently working on a project titled The Long Water: A Biography of the Yukon River that “examines how legal ideas—from where law originates to private property, rights to hunt or fish, and Indigenous land claims—and the ecology of the Yukon River mingled and changed each other over the past 200 years.”

The Department of History, The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago invite you to attend a talk by Scott K. Taylor (University of Kentucky) on his new book Ambivalent Pleasures: Soft Drugs and Embodied Anxiety in Early Modern Europe. The event will be held in the John Hope Franklin Room (SSRB 224) from 12:30-2:00 on April 22. 

Soft drugs like sugar, chocolate, tobacco, tea, coffee, distilled spirits, and opium were either new to early modern Europeans, or newly available in mass quantities. One way that western Europeans domesticated them was to claim them as medicines, thus rendering them safe to ingest substances from exotic peoples. But consumers immediately began using these drugs every day, and even when healthy. Critics called this abuse, but defenders of the practice defended daily consumption in terms that we might recognize today as part of a wellness regime. This talk will draw from the newly published book, Ambivalent Pleasures: Soft Drugs and Embodied Anxiety in Early Modern Europe, to explore whether their behavior fits better into our ideas of wellness, and self-care, or into our understanding of abusive self-medication.

Bio: Scott K. Taylor is a professor in the history department of the University of Kentucky. His most recent book is Ambivalent Pleasures: Soft Drugs and Embodied Anxiety in Early Modern Europe. His first book was Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain. Currently he is working on a project that uses the journals of James Boswell to explore the set and setting of drug and alcohol use in late 18th-century Europe. He is also planning a new project on street life in 18th-century Madrid.