NHC Events: Recent Episodes
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Thurs., February 7 "Murder as a Fine Art: The Ethics of Crime Fiction"Ruth Morse, Université Paris-Diderot, SorbonneClick here for audio recording of the eventSince 1995 Ruth Morse has been professeur des universités at the Université Paris-Diderot. She previously taught at the universities of London, Sussex, Leeds, and Cambridge, where she was director of studies in English at Fitzwilliam College for ten years. She is author or editor of eight books including Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Reality, and Representation (2005 [1991]) and Shakespeare, les français, les France (2008) for the Cahiers Charles-V, of which she was general editor for five years. Two additional edited volumes, Continuum Great Shakespeareans vol. XIV (Les Hugo, Pasternak Brecht, and Césaire) as well as Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents (with Peter Holland and Helen Cooper), are forthcoming in 2013. Morse is a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and a judge for the UK Crime Writers Association.In her talk, Morse will begin from the disdain in which popular genres have often been held and argue that crime fiction at its best has always explored key social and geo-political issues, including international threats such as arms, drugs, labor, money, and prostitution, and, through its conventions, has opened its readers to think about the world's elsewheres, while insisting upon universal moral and ethical ideas.
Thurs., January 10 — 5:00 p.m."Our Own Dark Ages: The Colonial Period and the Story of America"Fred Anderson, University of Colorado, BoulderAndrew Cayton, Miami UniversityClick here for audio recording of the eventOver the last six decades an extraordinary efflorescence of scholarship in social, economic, and cultural history has transformed historians' understanding of North America in the century before the Declaration of Independence. It has also shattered a once-familiar story of dawning nationhood into a multitude of local stories, many of them dark and violent, difficult to relate to each other and hard to connect to the history of the United States. In their talk, Fellows Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton will describe the framework within which they are working to assemble the fragmented stories of North American colonial development into a narrative at once consistent with modern scholarship and relevant to the national narrative recounted in later volumes of The Oxford History of the United States.Fred Anderson is professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author or editor of five books, including Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (2000) and The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000 (2005), which he wrote in collaboration with Andrew Cayton. This year, as the Archie K. Davis Fellow at the National Humanities Center, Anderson is again collaborating with Cayton on Imperial America, 1672-1764, a volume inThe Oxford History of the United States.Andrew Cayton is University Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He served as president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in 2011-12. He is the author or editor of nine books, including Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change, 1793-1818 (forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in Spring 2013). Cayton is working this year at the Center as the Frank H. Kenan Fellow.