Speaker:

Professor Christian Rutz, Harvard Radcliffe Fellow 2019-2020 & Professor of Biology, University of St. Andrews

Abstract: 

Within a mere ~100,000 years, human technology has advanced from basic, hand-crafted hunting and subsistence tools, to truly mind-boggling feats of engineering, like super computers and space shuttles. This astonishing progress, towards ever-more complex and efficient designs, is driven by the gradual accumulation of innovations. Although often considered a uniquely human phenomenon, at least...

Speaker: Professor Andrea Migliano, Universitat Zurich

Abstract: 

Contemporary hunter-gatherers provide a window into the ecological conditions for the emergence of humans’ unmatched cultural abilities. Andrea Migliano will discuss how the hunter-gatherers’ foraging...

Race, Representation and Museums Lecture Series

Lee D. Baker, Dean of Academic Affairs for Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Mrs. A. Hehmeyer Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University

Frederic Ward Putnam, one of the Peabody Museum’s earliest directors, played a key role in establishing anthropology as a scholarly field. He was also a driving force...

Race, Representation and Museums Lecture Series

Christopher Dean, Emeritus Professor of Anatomy, Division of Biosciences and Professorial Research Associate, Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, University College London

In 1912, British paleontologist Arthur Smith Woodward and amateur antiquarian Charles Dawson announced the discovery of a hominin in Sussex, England, thought to be a possible “missing link”...

Race, Representation and Museums Lecture Series

Donald Reid, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, Georgia State University; Affiliate Professor, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, University of Washington

Despite ideals of scientific and scholarly objectivity, both Egyptologists and non-specialists have often projected their own racial anxieties onto ancient Egypt. Recurrent attempts to...

Race, Representation and Museums Lecture Series

Corinne Kratz, Professor Emerita, Department of Anthropology and Institute of African Studies and Director, African Critical Inquiry Program, Emory University; Research Associate, Museum of International Folk Art

How do implicit understandings and assumptions about race and ethnicity become embedded in museum exhibitions? How can museums and exhibitions...

Race, Representation and Museums Lecture Series

J. Lorand Matory, Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Director, Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Project, Duke University

Since the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, the term “fetish” has invoked African gods as a metaphor for what European social critics believe to be disorders in European thought....

Race, Representation and Museums Lecture Series

Magnust Fiskesjö, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University

The official Chinese view of China’s history and national identity has been transformed in recent decades from a tale of revolutionary class struggle into a story of ancient and unbroken national and imperial glory. This shift can...