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Thursday, March 20, 2025

SUMMER 2025 COURSE REGISTRATION NOW OPEN!
View our in-person and online courses here.

1774 - In response to the Boston Tea Party, the British Parliament passes the first of the Intolerable Acts, the Boston Port Act, closing the Boston Port until colonists paid for the damages of the Tea Party.

1930 - Kentucky Fried Chicken is founded by Colonel Harland Sanders in North Cobin, Kentucky.

2016 - Barack Obama becomes the first US President to visit Cuba since 1928.

The Phillips Collection Captures the Timelessness of Alphonse Mucha. Washington City Paper.

Tracking D.C.’s cherry blossoms: Buds reach third stage and are halfway to peak bloom. The Washington Post.

Weekend Roundup: March 20-23. Georgetowner.

Photo credit: Mora McLean

This newsletter edition we spotlight current PhD candidate Mora McLean! Mora’s current research focuses on the history of the Africa-America Institute (AAI), a Washington DC-based nonprofit created in the mid-twentieth century to administer U.S. government-sponsored scholarships for Africans to study at U.S. universities. Prior to coming to GW, Mora collaborated with the late Nigerian political philosopher and scholar-activist Claude Ake, where she was inspired to challenge the concept of “development” both epistemically and historically. Through this work, Mora explored how the facade of neutrality masked self-referential assumptions and undemocratic underpinnings of social science theories hatched in the United States during the Cold War era. Mora’s newly defined perception of development encouraged her to further explore the ways in which power shapes what we think we know and deem important. 

In her research, Mora explores the lesser known activities of AAI including its School Services Program (School Services). Initially conceived as a vehicle for expanding the constituency for U.S Cold War liberal-inspired policies toward African countries, the program was launched in 1968 to infuse Africa into K-12 curricula across the United States and provided free supplementary instructional materials and training workshops for teachers. However, under the leadership of Evelyn Jones Rich, a Black former New York City high school history teacher, School Services honored an all-but-forgotten dimension of AAI’s founding mission to educate Americans with a holistic view of Africa as both the birthplace of humanity and central to the creation of the United States and the modern world. 

By recovering the history of AAI’s School Services Program, Mora intends to provide new insights into the politics of knowledge production and dissemination about Africa in the US through the 1970s. Her work examines a convergence of three key approaches: the perspective of then emergent Black Studies that viewed the study of Africa as inseparable from studies of the worldwide African Diaspora; the U.S. Cold War mission to inform Americans more broadly about and gain influence in decolonizing Africa; and the long tradition of African American intellectuals and educators committed to tailoring Africa-focused content for school age children. Mora hopes her studies will shed new light on the problematic ways in which Africa and its people, politics, economies, and cultures have been historically represented, if at all, in U.S. K-12 education and why these shortcomings persist. 

On The Promise of Beauty
Prof. Mimi Thi Nguyen
2025 Mergen-Palmer Distinguised Lecture

The historical present is often perceived through the presence or absence of beauty, such that distinct personal, social, and political projects unfold through disputes about the beauty we deserve – which is to say, the life worth living. How might affective and aesthetic responses to scarcity, precarity, and uncertainty, drawn from the crises of war and colonial and capital dispossession, help us to understand the promise of beauty as a world-building engagement? This lecture considers how the promise of beauty is so usable across a spectrum of political claims, whether imperial or insurgent, and how these claims delineate what forms of life are valuable, and for whom. 

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author The Gift of Freedom and The Promise of Beauty.

When: Tuesday, April 15, 2025; 4:00 PM EST
Where: Corcoran Hall, 725 21st NW, Room 204

Register here!

The Inner Life of Race
Book Talk with Professor Leerom Medovoi
GW American Studies & GW English

Calling into question accounts of race as a politics of embodiment, this talk approaches race instead as a biopolitics of populational threat that relies on a longstanding dialectic of body and soul. While the body can be seen and marked, the soul signals potentially threatening interiorities: dangerous intentions, beliefs, or desires. This talk approaches race as the power-effect of reading and securing the body in order to police the political threat of inner life. In this talk Medovoi sketches a genealogy of racial securitization that begins with medieval deployments of inquisition and confession to wage war against heretics, infidels, and their threat to the salvation of souls. The talk will weave together the histories of color-line racism, nativism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anticommunism into a general account of populational racism that sheds light on the flexible targeting of populations we face in an era of strengthening far-right populism.

When: Thursday, March 20, 2025; 4:00 PM EST
Where: Hall of Government, 700 21st St NW, Room 104

Register here!

“Seeing, Sensing, Feeling: Representing Puta Life”
Juana María Rodríguez
GW English Department

Drawing on the publication of her recent book, Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Duke UP, 2023), this talk explores how different genres of representation–from graphic narratives and oral histories to documentary films and social-media selfies–shape the life stories we consume. As a rumination on the limits and possibilities of representation, it probes the queer things that words do to images and that images do to words in order to confront the ethical quandaries posed by our role as authors and academics in representing the sexual lives of others.

When: Wednesday, March 26, 2025; 3:00 PM EST
Where: Myers Room, GW/Textile Museum, 701 21st NW

"Everything Is Going To Be All Right"
Professor Eric Gottesman
GW Corcoran School of the Arts & Design

At a pivotal moment in history, the W. W. Corcoran Visiting Professor of Community Engagement and artist Eric Gottesman will be speaking about his collaborative work over the past 25 years, which has fused photography, art, teaching, and civic action by incorporating interpersonal interaction as an essential component of authorship. Gottesman has never made an artwork alone, nor, would he argue, has anyone who has made or done anything done so in isolation. Shifting our lens from the individual to the collective fundamentally changes the artistic, national, global, and personal possibilities available to us in the future. Gottesman will show how it has done so for him and for the participants in projects he has worked on.

When: Wednesday, March 26, 2025; 6:30 PM EST
Where: Hammer Auditorium (500 17th Street NW)

Register here!

Ordinary Cruelty: Explaining Misogyny without Dehumanization
Professor Kate Manne, Cornell University
GW Philosophy Department

Just as we can ask what happens within history or indeed philosophy when we center women’s voices, we can ask what would happen within moral psychology when we center women’s predicaments. What would happen, in other words, if we regarded misogyny not as a marginal phenomenon but placed it firmly at the center of our understanding of how people can and do mistreat one another? In this lecture, Manne shows that interpersonal cruelty can often be explained in ordinary moral terms in conjunction with facts about social hierarchy.

When: Thursday, March 27, 2025; 4:00 PM EST
Where: 1957 E Street NW, Room 212

GW WGSS Yulee Lecture
Professors Lisa Guenther & E. Ornelas

Join the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) community for the annual Yulee Lecture. Professor Guenther will share her research on "Unsettling Perception: A Critical Phenomenology of Settler Colonial Body Schemas." Colonial power shapes the everyday lives of settlers in ways we often overlook. It structures our habits of thought and perception, our desires and fears, our knowledge and ignorance. How do we disrupt these colonial structures, such that they no longer function as common sense but become legible as harmful patterns that remain open to transformation? Professor Ornelas will share their research on “Speculative Fiction, Abolition, and the Limits of the Settler Colonial Imaginary" and discuss the presumed impossibility of abolition and what that says about the constraints around imagining otherwise.

When: Monday, March 31, 2025; 3:00 PM EST
Where: University Student Center, Room 310

Register here!

Book Talk & Launch:
This Is Rhythm w/ Prof. Gayle Wald
Politics & Prose

Based on dozens of interviews and access to Ella Jenkins's personal archives, Gayle F. Wald's This Is Rhythm shares how Jenkins, a "rhythm specialist" with no formal musical training, became the most prolific and significant American children's musician of the twentieth century, creating a beloved catalog of songs grounded in values of community-building, antiracism, and cultural pluralism. Wald traces how the daughter of southern migrants translated the music of her own Black girlhood on the South Side of Chicago into a form of civil rights activism--a musical education that empowered children by introducing them to Black history, African diasporic rhythms, and a participatory, community-centered approach to music. Prof. Wald will be in conversation with NPR Morning Edition host Michel Martin at Politics and Prose.

When: Sunday, April 27, 2025; 5:00 PM EST
Where: 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW, DC 20008

PhD alum Colin Anderson's (PhD '22) book Culture and Containment: Race, Geographic Mobility, and Popular Culture in the United States, 1845-1900, is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press! Colin is currently Assistant Professor of History and Law/Director of the Law, Justice, and Advocacy Program in the Department of History, Geography, and Legal Studies at the University of Tampa.

Call for Proposals: ASAP/16 is currently accepting proposals for their 2025 conference, which will be held in Houston, TX. Click here to learn more // Deadline: Mar. 28, 2025

Call for Papers: Ampersand: An American Studies Journal is currently accepting submissions for their Summer 2025 issue “Disrupting Forms.” Click here to learn more // Deadline: Apr. 1, 2025

Call for Applications: The DC History Center will offer two Totman Fellowships for summer 2025 through spring 2026: one focused on research on LGBTQ+ DC and one focused on research relating to Black Washington. Click here to learn more // Deadline: Apr. 11, 2025

Call for Papers: American Quarterly will publish a special issue on Indigenous Borderlands. It aims to bring together a range of interdisciplinary scholars who analyze borders and borderlands from the perspective of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Click here to learn more // Deadline: Apr. 15, 2025

Call for Applications: The U.S. branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music is pleased to offer financial support of up to $2,500 for graduate student-led events that promote wider engagement with current research on popular music, broadly conceived. Click here to learn more // Deadline: Apr. 15, 2025

Call for Applications: Monument Lab is currently seeking applications for their Summer 2025 paid student internship program. Click here to learn more // Deadline: Apr. 21, 2025

Call for Applications: The Whiting Foundation is seeking applications to support writers working on a book-length work of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction for a general adult readership. Click here to learn more // Deadline: Apr. 23, 2025

Call for Applications: Democracy House is currently accepting applications for their Young Leaders Summer Institute (YLSI) scheduled for Summer 2025. Click here to learn more // Deadline: May 4, 2025

Call for Submissions: GW's University Writing Program is currently accepting submissions for The Julian Clement Chase Prize for Research Writing on the District of Columbia. Click here to learn more// Deadline: May 15, 2025

Call for Applications: The Foggy Bottom Association is seeking GW students for three research internship opportunities. Click here to learn more // Deadline: Rolling

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What We're Listening To!
"Abracadabra" — Lady Gaga
"The Rhythm of the Night" — Corona

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