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Dialogue Series

The Kaplan Institute Dialogue Series brings conversations in the humanities to the public sphere. For 2015-2016, we will explore Native American and Indigenous Studies topics of history and cultural production. 

A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek

A Misplaced Massacre book cover

Wednesday, February 3, 2016
5:00 pm
Harris Hall, Room 108

1881 Sheridan Road, Evanston

Professor Ari Kelman, Penn State University

Lecture and roundtable discussion about Sand Creek, historical trauma, institutional memory and national identity, with Northwestern faculty members Elizabeth Son (Theatre), Kelly Wisecup (English) and moderator Ken Alder (History).

This event is free and open to the public, and made possible in part by the Harris Fund.

Ari Kelman head shot

Ari Kelman is the McCabe Greer Professor of History at Penn State University, where he teaches a wide range of courses, including on the Civil War and Reconstruction, the politics of memory, environmental history, Native American history, and America in the 1960s. He is the author, most recently, of Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War (Hill and Wang, 2015), as well as A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press, 2013), recipient of the Antoinette Forrester Downing Book Award, the Avery O. Craven Award, the Bancroft Prize, the Tom Watson Brown Book Award, and the Robert M. Utley Prize; and A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (University of California Press, 2003), which won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize.

Kelman’s essays and articles have appeared in SlateThe Christian Science MonitorThe Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, the Journal of Urban HistoryThe Journal of American History, and many others. Kelman has also contributed to outreach endeavors aimed at K-12 educators, and to a variety of public history projects, including documentary films for the History Channel and PBS’s American Experience series. He has received numerous grants and fellowships, most notably from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Huntington Library. He is now working on For Liberty and Empire: How the Civil War Bled into the Indian Wars.

Winter Quarter Talks

January 27, 2016 – 5:00 pm
Atomic Indians: Pueblo Art and Environmental Conflicts of 20th Century Northern New Mexico
Patricia Marroquin Norby (D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies)

February 1, 2016 – 12:00 pm
The Liminality of Empire: The Making of the Savage in a Lawless Land
Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark (University of Victoria)

February 11, 2016 – 12:30 pm
Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakota Oyate, 1862-1934
Christopher Pexa (Oklahoma State University)

February 15, 2016 – 12:30 pm
Hating Hawaiians, Loving Hybrids: Social Scientific Histories of Race and Indigeneity in Hawai'i
Maile Arvin (University of California, Riverside)

February 18, 2016 – 12:30 pm
Unsettling Territory: Oneida Indian Resurgence and Anti-Sovereignty Backlash
Doug Kiel (Williams College)