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Monday, February 9th, 2026 at 7 PM ET

Join us on the evening of February 9th for a virtual seminar with author and historian Natalie Léger about her new book: Haiti and the Revolution Unseen: The Persistence of the Radical Decolonial Imagination (Vanderbilt, 2025).

Since the 1938 publication of the Black Trinidadian writer C.L.R James’s seminal history of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 20th-century Caribbean anticolonialists imagined Caribbean freedom through Haiti. This imagining bore classics of Caribbean literature from the likes of the white Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (The Kingdom of this World, 1947) and the Black Martinican writers, Aimé Césaire (The Tragedy of King Christophe, 1963) and Édouard Glissant (Monsieur Toussaint, 1961). These texts are rightfully classics, but they are foundational works that misremember and misrepresent the Revolution as a republican feat led by Caribbean-born revolutionists. They write Africans (or Ginens) out of the uprising, notwithstanding that two-thirds of the enslaved were African-born on the eve of the uprising. This talk addresses the political consequences of erasing Africans from the story of the Haitian Revolution in the moment of 20th century Caribbean anticolonialism. It argues that without them the story becomes a poor means of inspiring anticolonial contestation as intended and worse, Haiti and Haitians, become representative of the impossibility of securing liberation from colonial predation.

Natalie M. Léger is an Associate Professor of English at Temple University, who specializes in twentieth-century anti-colonial thought and decolonial philosophy in Caribbean literature and African diasporic fiction. Her research interests also focus on race and visual culture, Latin American literature, and magical realist cultural production. Her first book, Haiti and the Revolution Unseen: The Persistence of the Radical Decolonial Imagination, was recently published with Vanderbilt University Press.

Hosted by the Program of African American History

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Wednesday, March 18th, 2026, at 7 PM ET

Join us for an exciting conversation with the editors and two contributors to The Gendered Republic: Reimagining Identity in the New Nation (University of Virginia, 2025).

What does it mean to study early American history through gender?  The authors of the new collection, The Gendered Republic, bring together women’s history with masculinity studies to showcase the transformative impact of gender history on our understanding of the early American republic. Collectively, the contributors showcase the vibrancy of gender history as a frame of inquiry, revealing how shifting notions of women’s and men’s roles shaped the lives of people in the early American republic—White, Black, and Indigenous—and how those people, in turn, experienced and redefined gender and, with it, their communities, cultures, laws, families, and nations.

Rachel Hope Cleves is Professor of History at the University of Victoria and a contributor to The Gendered Republic

Lorri Glover is Professor of History at Saint Louis University and co-editor of The Gendered Republic

Kenneth E. Marshall is Professor of History at SUNY Oswego and a contributor to The Gendered Republic

Craig Thompson Friend is Professor of History and Public History at North Carolina State University and co-editor of The Gendered Republic

Sponsored by the Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Program in Women’s History at the Library Company of Philadelphia

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Tuesday, April 21st, 2026 at 7 PM ET

Join us to discuss Alec Zuercher Reichardt’s new book, Roads to Power, Roads to Crisis: The War for the American Interior and the Infrastructural Routes of Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025).

The construction of imperial communications infrastructure led to British victory in the Seven Years’ War, yet it was also the empire’s undoing, laying the roads to Revolution.

Centering on the eighteenth-century struggle for the greater Ohio Valley, this book uncovers a much larger imperial competition, one for control over Atlantic and North American information and transportation networks. By the height of the Seven Years’ War, this contest had propelled Britain to construct imperial infrastructure that outpaced the efforts of France, its primary European rival, and that successfully co-opted Indigenous ally channels. However, the rise of the British North American infrastructure state was also the empire’s downfall. The same roads, printing presses, and postal networks constructed and funded by the War Office and imperial treasury quickly also became the primary routes for those revolutionaries who sought to oppose the British state.

Alec Reichardt is Associate Professor of History and Kinder Institute Associate Professor of Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. He received his BA from Duke and his PhD from Yale University. A historian of early North America and the Atlantic World, he’s published essays and articles on the global eighteenth-century British Empire, French military infrastructure, Indigenous textual translation, as well as a co-edited collection, Inlands: Empires, Contested Interiors, and the Connection of the World (Columbia University Press, 2024).

Hosted by the Program in Early American Economy and Society