ONGOING
White House of the Confederacy Tours & Special Exhibit on the Lost Cause
Location: White House of the Confederacy, 1201 E. Clay Street
Description: The house was home to Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, and his family from August, 1861, until the evacuation of Richmond on April 2, 1865. It served as the political and social epicenter of wartime Richmond.
With the end of the war, the house was headquarters for the U.S. army of occupation and became headquarters for Military District No. 1 during Reconstruction. In 1870, the U.S. Government gave the house back to the City of Richmond, which used the building for its Central School until 1894. The Confederate Memorial Literary Society took possession of the property and established the Confederate Museum in the building, which opened its doors to the public in February, 1896.
In 1976 a new museum building was opened and restoration was begun to bring the appearance of the house back to the period of the Civil War. The restored house was opened to the public in June, 1988. On September 30, 2018, the museum building closed, to give collections staff time to pack up the collection for its move to the Museum’s new facility at Historic Tredegar. The White House remains open daily for tours.
The White House currently holds a large number of furnishings and artifacts that were in the house with the Davis family. All of the remaining items are original to the period, except for the textiles which are reproductions based on original fabrics or period patterns.
Roundtable Event: Afro-Diasporicities: Memory, Resistance, and Healing in the 21st Century
Location: Carole Weinstein International Center Commons
Date: Wednesday, January 29
Time: 5:30-7:30 PM
Description: How does the body remember? In what ways is embodied knowledge stored and passed down from one generation to another? How can the arts be used as a vehicle for steering society towards greater justice? Songs, music, and dances have fortified communities of color with ancestral knowledge, embodied resistance, and healing practices. In this hybrid roundtable, partially discussion and partially music and dance interventions, we turn to the term “afro-diasporicities” to bring into sharper focus how the lived experience of black diasporic beings and their movement, music, culture, and spiritual practices, which are rooted in a place yet historically uprooted and/or rerouted, exist, intersect, and evolve.
Invited guest speakers and practitioners:
Kevin LaMarr Jones, Claves Unidos
Alex LaSalle, with Julia Gutiérrez and Mateo González, Redobles de Cultura
MK Abadoo, Department of Dance and Choreography, Virginia Commonwealth University
Free Egunfemi Bangura, Untold RVA
Lauranette Lee, Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond
Moderators:
Alicia Díaz and Patricia Herrera, Department of Theatre and Dance, University of Richmond
Event is free and open to the public.
Let’s Talk: Lost Cause
Location: White House of the Confederacy
Date: Thursday, February 6
Time: 6-7:30 PM
Description: The Lost Cause shaped how generations of people have both remembered history and understood their present lives, but its vision of the past isn’t accurate. Join a small group conversation that explores the new exhibit, House of the Lost Cause, and uncovers how the Lost Cause has impacted you and the lives of others. Featuring Caroline Janney, Ph.D. (University of Virginia). Space is limited, registration strongly encouraged.
RSVP here
Contested Ground: Memory, Monuments & Power
Location: Brown-Alley Room
Date: Wednesday, February 12
Time: 12-1:15 PM
Description: This moderated discussion will include a roundtable on research by Jannette Amaral-Rodriguez (LALIS), Elizabeth Baughan (Classical Studies), Erin Holloway Palmer (Independent Editor), and Will Wasta Werner (Classical Studies and History).
Moderated by: Rob Nelson (Digital Scholarship Lab)
Pizza and drinks provided.
Burial Ground Research Discussion
Location: Whitehurst Living Room
Date: Thursday, February 20
Time: 9 AM
Description: The Burial Ground Memorialization Committee invites faculty, staff, and students to hear about and discuss the recently released research by Dr. Lauranett Lee and Shelby Driskill into the history of the land that is now the University’s campus, including the findings about the enslaved burial ground on the land. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session and the conversation will help inform the work of the burial ground memorialization committee that Dr. Crutcher has charged to work this semester. An opportunity to visit the burial ground site will follow the discussion.
The Jim Crow Cigarette from Richmond to China: An Intimate History
Location: International Center Commons
Date: Thursday, February 27
Time: 4:30 – 5:30 PM
Description:
The global cigarette of the twentieth century had its beginning in Richmond at the factories of Lewis Ginter and John Pope, made of bright leaf tobacco grown in Virginia and North Carolina. Soon this cigarette, developed in tandem with Jim Crow segregation, circulated around the world, including to China where the British American Tobacco Company built a thriving industry. This talk tells the story of how Ginter marketed the bright leaf cigarette first in gentlemen’s clubs in London, and how this cigarette soon came to dominate a global industry. In the process, Jim Crow segregation also inflected global capitalism.
Speaker: Nan Enstad, Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the author of Cigarettes Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism.
Walls, Borders, and Partitions in Global Perspective
Location: University of Richmond, Richmond Room
Date: Friday, February 28
Time: 9 AM – 4 PM (see below for session times)
Description: The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the subsequent reunification of Germany were met with a mixture of euphoria, anxiety, and hope, inspiring a desire for an end to walls and militarized borders around the world. In retrospect, we were closer to a world without border walls in 1989 than we are today. In 1989 only 15 countries had border walls. As of November 2017, however, over 70 walls separated nations and states—50 of which were constructed following September 11, 2001.
Examples of contemporary border walls include not only the increasingly tense border between the United States and Mexico (930 km), but also Spain and Morocco (19 km) and Israel and the West Bank (708 km). In many cases, these walls have destroyed more lives than the Berlin Wall, promoting human suffering by intensifying socio-economic inequality, restricting access to resources and social services, and fostering a cycle of division, mistrust, violence, and fatalities.
This conference explores the reasons for the proliferation of walls and their impacts on migration, citizenship, and possibilities for peace as well as their role in reconfiguring border landscapes and communities.
9:15 – 10:30 am | Walls and their Discontents: Migration, Peace, and the Politics of Division
Introduction: Dr. Miguel Díaz-Barriga, Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Richmond
“Border Wall Proliferation and Circumvention Strategies”: Dr. Élisabeth Vallet, Director of the Center for Geopolitical Studies at the Raoul-Dandurand Chair of Strategic and Diplomatic Studies, University of Quebec-Montreal
“The Post-conflict Promise of Peace? Enduring Peace Walls and their Impact on Lived Experience and Memory of ‘the Troubles’ in Contemporary Northern Ireland”: Dr. Laura McAtackney, Associate Professor, Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University
Moderator: Dr. Kathrin Bower, Professor of German Studies, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures and Associate Dean, Arts and Sciences, University of Richmond
10:45 – 12:00 pm | Walls, Colonialism, and the Politics of Fragmentation
Introduction: Dr. Miguel Díaz-Barriga, Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Richmond
“The Violence of Israel’s Separation Wall: An Ethnography through Multiple Analytics”: Dr. Amahl Bishara, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, Affiliate Faculty, Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism & Diaspora, Tufts University
“The Political Ecology of Languagelessness of the Southwest North American Region: Case Studies in the Linguistic Commoditization of Mexican Origin People.”: Dr. Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez, Regents’ Professor, School of Transborder Studies and School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Motorola Presidential Professor of Neighborhood Revitalization, Arizona State University
Moderator: Dr. Margaret Dorsey, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Richmond
1:45 – 3:00 pm | Keynote
Introduction: Dr. Katrina Nousek, Visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Richmond
“Making the Iron Curtain: The Violence of Germany’s Wall”: Dr. Edith Sheffer, Senior Fellow at University of California Berkeley’s Institute for European Studies
Moderator: Dr. Michelle Kahn, Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Richmond