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
2024 - 2025 Events
Country Music as Theory
Minority Identities and Vernacular Visual Culture
Minority groups are often underrepresented in official archives, which has resulted in their continuing marginalization in historiography. Critical archive scholars argue for empowering such groups by developing and investigating archival collections. This symposium explored this approach by demonstrating how the visual practices of underrepresented groups can be studied through underutilized data sources. To this end, the symposium focused on indigenous, black, and diaspora communities seen through their visual production, with the presumption that the vernacular representations of everyday life can provide substantial insights into evolving minority identities. Therefore, it explored the interplay of vernacular visual practices and the transformations of minority identities by posing two broad research questions: What is the role of vernacular visual practice in shaping minority identities? How does looking at identity through vernacular images challenge pervasive representations of minority groups?
Inaugural Indigeneity and Arts Conference
We have 44 incredible presenters from different Native Nations across North America and Latin America, and as far as the Philippines. Including a performance by a Lakota hoop dancer, Starr Chief Eagle, and two musical performances by the Kichwa Community of Chicago and Wari spoken word and hip hop artist Bobby Sanchez, as well as a keynote address by Debra Yepa-Pappan (Jemez Pueblo/Korean), the director of the Center for Native Futures.
Mutual Necessary Otherness
The Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Chicago hosted a symposium on the ordinary, the subtle, the pernicious, in sum the “micro” dimensions of inequality, identity, feeling, and togetherness. Mutual Necessary Otherness will feature research talks by literary critics, sociologists, visual studies scholars, and music theorists, together revealing innovative concepts and methods for interpreting large issues of history and sociability that turn on minor gestures and details. Our symposium creates a space for all thinkers who study the undercurrents of social interaction in order to understand sedimented systems, knowledges, histories, and meaning.
2025 Spring Institute
The Sociology department’s student-run Spring Institute invited faculty and scholars from across the Midwest to participate and speak broadly on this year’s theme of Power and Social Inequality and their strong connections with American Culture. Featuring a keynote address by Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, Matthew Clair.
The Hannah Arendt Circle
Initially founded in 2008, the eighteenth annual meeting of the Arendt Circle was co-hosted by Loyola University Chicago and the University of Chicago. The conference brought a series of collaborative, interdisciplinary discussions of 16 papers presented by scholars of Arendt, German Studies, Jewish Studies, Political Theory, Philosophy, Literature, and more. This year’s conference featured a keynote lecture by 3CT’s own Dr. Linda Zerilli (Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago), with responses by several UChicago faculty, and a panel of distinguished Chicago-area scholars of Arendt and 20th-century political theory.
Seth Rockman
In collaboration with the New Directions in American History Workshop, we welcomed Stone Faculty Affiliate Seth Rockman (Brown University) to discuss his new book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (UChicago Press, 2024), which was named by the Pulitzer Prize Board as a finalist in the category of History, recognizing the book as a groundbreaking contribution to the study of American slavery and capitalism.
Matthew Lassiter
In collaboration with the New Directions in American History Workshop, we welcomed Matthew Lassiter for a conversation on his recent book, The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs., In this incisive political history, Matthew Lassiter shows how the category of the “white middle-class victim” has been as central to the politics and culture of the drug war as racial stereotypes like the “foreign trafficker,” “urban pusher,” and “predatory ghetto addict.” He describes how the futile mission to safeguard and control white suburban youth shaped the enactment of the nation’s first mandatory-minimum drug laws in the 1950s, and how soaring marijuana arrests of white Americans led to demands to refocus on “real criminals” in inner cities. The 1980s brought “just say no” moralizing in the white suburbs and militarized crackdowns in urban centers.
Meredith L. McGill
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
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.
Jan Radway
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
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.
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
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
A Conversation with Karl Berglund
American Empire: Extraction and Environment
A Conversation with Barbara Mcquade
A Conversation with Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
A Conversation with Michael Zakim
Visible Designs: The Arts of Race and Capitalism
