The Karla Scherer Center For The Study Of American Culture

Events

The Making of Americans – Paris, 1925

The Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture and the John W. Boyer Center in Paris present

Marking the 100th anniversary of the publication of Gertrude Stein’s novel,
this conference asks how Americans were made, unmade, and remade by a city
that drew artists, musicians, dancers, and writers across the Atlantic, often for years.

 

Friday, May 16th, 2025
1:30–6:00 pm
Saturday, May 17th, 2025
10:00–5:30 pm

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Share your ideas:

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

Charlie Eaton Class Struggles: The Elite War on Universities

Thursday, May 15, 2025, 6:00–7:30 pm
Cobb Hall 307, 5811 S. Ellis Ave

Elites from big finance and big tech have supported an attempted hostile takeover of universities by a US president. This is strange on its surface. Many of these same economic elites are alumni of and donors to elite universities. Some even have university buildings named for them.

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Mutual Necessary Otherness: A Symposium on the Micro

Please join the English Department and the Franke Institute for the Humanities on Saturday, May 24th for an all-day symposium on the ordinary, the subtle, the pernicious, in sum the “micro” dimensions of inequality, identity, feeling, and togetherness.

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2024 - 2025 Events

Meredith L. McGill

The Black Bibliography Project
Meredith L. McGill, co-director of the Black Bibliography Project, held a conversation about the history of twentieth-century attempts to organize Black writing and preserve evidence of Black achievement alongside a display of relevant works of interest from the University of Chicago Library’s Special Collections.

Megan Heffernan

Between Libraries: The Maintenance of Early Modernity in Chicago
University of Chicago alumnus Megan Heffernan discussed the long afterlife of early modern print within the modern research library alongside a display of re-bound early modern books from the University of Chicago Library’s Special Collections Research Center.

Janice Radway

Thinking about Girl-Made Zines, Their Travels, the 1990s, and Beyond
Less a traditional lecture than a series of reflections about the challenges of engaging a difficult archive over an unusually long period of time, my presentation will explore key issues in my ongoing effort to say something useful about the intersection of the zine form and a hard to define cohort of girls and young women in the 1990s.

Barbara E. Mundy

Ben Leeming

Mary Elizabeth Haude

An Aztec-Language Book from Mexico at the Newberry Reveals Its Secrets
Long regarded as one of the Newberry’s Latin American treasures is a book of sermons written in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. The result of a collaboration between Franciscan missionaries and Indigenous students, it is one of the earliest surviving examples of Christian writing in an Indigenous language of the Americas. Recently, it revealed a great secret. Scientific analysis revealed that it was written on a very rare paper made of maguey, best known as the plant that yields tequila. In this presentation, an anthropologist, an art historian, and a conservator discuss their work on the Newberry manuscript and the meaning of its once-hidden and now-revealed secret.
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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