The Karla Scherer Center For The Study Of American Culture

Events

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What events would you like to see in the 2024-25 academic year?

The American Culture Center aims to represent our community by organizing events and activities that interest you all. If you have any ideas for activities, speakers, or topics, please contact Nolan Kishbaugh at americanculture@uchicago.edu.

American Culture Events at UChicago

Alongside our multidisciplinary seminar, the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture sponsors interdisciplinary conferences, lectures, workshops, and other events on and off campus. We also coordinate with various existing graduate student workshops on campus. What follows is a list of events at the University of Chicago relating to American Culture. The American Culture Center organizes some of these, and some are organized by other entities on campus.

Associated events

Browse our incomplete list of events hosted by our partners across the university that we think you may be interested in.

TALK Democratic Exhaustion with Dirk Jörke (Darmstadt University)

For several years now, people have been talking about a crisis of democracy. Articles and books on the subject often end with proposals for revitalizing democracy, whether through institutional reform or by calling on citizens to defend democracy. However, the possibility that this is not a temporary crisis but a transition to a new regime is ignored.
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A Pressing Call: 500 Years of Women Printing

A Pressing Call: Five Centuries of Women Printing features the stories of women who have worked in the print trade in a variety of roles including as publishers, print shop proprietors, typesetters and compositors, and booksellers. The history of women’s contributions to book production has been obscured by the societal constraints placed on women’s labor, and they were often hidden behind the names of men or corporate bodies. If one knows how and where to look, however, it becomes clear that thousands of books were printed by women.
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South Side Impresarios: A Lecture and Recital —With Samantha Ege

Join musicologist and international concert pianist Samantha Ege on April 10 from 6:00 pm -7:00 pm either in person at Ruggles Hall or via Zoom for a musical performance and discussion of her new book about the women who put Chicago’s Black classical music on a cultural map of their own making. A book signing will follow from 7:00 pm to 7:30 pm.
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The 2025 Newberry Library Award Celebration

Join the Newberry at the Drake on May 2nd from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. to honor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for his outstanding contributions to the humanities.

 

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2024 - 2025 Events

Author Event: Jonathan D. S. Schroeder

The Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture is pleased to partner with the New Directions in American History Workshop and the Seminary Co-op Bookstore on two events featuring Jonathan D. S. Schroeder. In the First, Jon led a methods workshop on “Global Histories, Popular Audiences, and New Genres.” After that, he participated in an event at the Seminary Co-op where he discussed his book “The United States Governed By Six Hundred Thousand Despots” and responded to questions.

100 Years of Melville's Billy Budd

100 Years of Melville’s Billy Budd: Manuscript to Modernism

The Scherer Center helped to commemorate the centennial of the posthumous publication of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd with a presentation by internationally renowned Melville scholar John Bryant about his new edition of the text, a discussion led by University of Chicago Professor Jennifer Fleissner, and a display of rare materials related to Billy Budd and the “Melville Revival” of the 1920s.

IIRP Grand Opening

International Institute of Research in Paris Inaugural Panel

The Grand Opening of the new John W. Boyer Center in Paris (41 rue des Grands Moulins, 75013 Paris, France) took place on Thursday, November 14th. The Center reflects UChicago’s commitment to collaborating with institutions and researchers worldwide. The city’s central location and broad range of research facilities offer new possibilities for bringing UChicago scholars and researchers together with their international counterparts. In addition, UChicago’s ties to Paris run deep—previous generations of UChicago scholars built strong partnerships with French counterparts and institutions.

New Perspectives on Constitutions In The Era of Revolutions

New Perspectives on Constitutions In The Era of Revolutions

This international conference was part of a series of scientific events organized by the AMERICA 2026 consortium to provide new perspectives on late 18th-century Western constitutions, mainly the French and American Constitutions. Among other things, the conference highlighted points of convergence (for instance, the production of Republican constitutions in the Age of Revolutions) and contrasts between the French constitutional model—the succession of several national constitutions since the French Revolution—and the American one—both the national constitution and state constitutions are considered.

2023 - 2024 Events

The John Hope Franklin Lecture and Workshop
the Annual John Hope Franklin Lecture Series featured Vivek Bald (MIT, Comparative Media Studies and Writing) who offered a lecture, “Cross-Racial Histories, Transmedia Stories: The Bengali Harlem Project.”  Also Joined by Nitasha Tamar Sharma of Northwestern University for a conversation and workshop on the Bengali Harlem Project.
A Conversation with Karl Berglund
Drawing from the recently published book Reading Audio Readers, this talk uncovered how people use this medium by investigating a unique set of reader consumption data. Offering an academic perspective on the kind of user data hoard we associate with tech companies, it asks: when it comes to audiobooks, what do people really read, and how and when do they read it?
American Empire: Extraction and Environment
The Shapiro Initiative on Environment and Society (SIES) and several partners hosted a conference featuring panels of junior scholars, graduate students, and PhD candidates to discuss the long growing Global consensus that has been growing for decades regarding the need for a transition toward fossil-fuel-free energy production.

A Conversation with Barbara Mcquade
Barbara McQuade discussed her new book“Attack from Within: How Misinformation is Sabotaging America” with Jill Wine-Banks followed by Q&A and signing. Attach from Within is an urgent, comprehensive explanation of the ways disinformation is impacting democracy, and practical solutions that can be pursued to strengthen the public, media, and truth-based politics.
A Conversation with Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal discussed his upcoming book, The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It. Perl-Rosenthal, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern California, provides a sweeping history of the revolutionary years (1760-1825) across continents, exploring the intertwining forces of progress and reaction.
A Conversation with Michael Zakim
Michael Zakim is the author of Ready-Made Democracy (a political history of men’s dress), Accounting for Capitalism (a cultural history of the market economy), and the forthcoming Global History of Paper (a material-driven study of knowledge and its uses). He teaches history at Tel Aviv University. This event is free and open to the public.
Visible Designs: The Arts of Race and Capitalism
“Visible Designs: The Arts of Race and Capitalism,” a symposium that gathered researchers in design studies, art history, and cultural history who foreground visual art and cultural institutions in studying racial capitalism in the United States from colonial slavery to the present.
A Conversation with Korey Garibaldi
A conversation with Korey Garibaldi on his recent book Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America (Princeton University Press). The discussion will be hosted by Eric Slauter, Director of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture.
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