Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2024 | 7 p.m.
Reception to follow
Stude Concert Hall, Shepherd School of Music, Rice University
Speakers
Douglas Brinkley
Katherine Tsanoff Brown Professor of Humanities, Department of History, Rice University | CNN Presidential Historian Grammy Award Winner, 2023, 2017
Douglas Brinkley is the presidential historian for the New-York Historical Society, a trustee of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. The Chicago Tribune dubbed him “America’s New Past Master.”
He is the author of numerous books and the recipient of many distinguished prizes. His books include studies of six presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. He has also written widely on the history of climate change and the environment, most notably: The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, which received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and his most recent Silent Spring Revolution on Rachel Carson and the “great environmental awakening.” He is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates in American studies.
W. Caleb McDaniel
Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Humanities | Professor of History, Rice University | Pulitzer Prize Winner, 2020
W. Caleb McDaniel is a historian of the United States. His teaching and research have focused on the 19th century, the Civil War Era and the struggle over slavery. From 2019 to 2023, he served as co-chair of the Rice University Task Force on Slavery, Segregation and Racial Injustice. He is currently working with co-chair Alexander X. Byrd, 1990, associate professor of History, on a book version of the three-part task force report.
Caleb McDaniel’s latest book, Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America, received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in History and the Civil War and the Reconstruction Book Award from the Organization of American Historians. His first book, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery, won the Merle Curti award from the Organization of American Historians and the James Broussard Prize from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic. His scholarly articles have appeared in the Journal of the Civil War Era, the Journal of the Early Republic, American Quarterly and elsewhere, and he has published essays in the New York Times, Smithsonian, The Atlantic and other outlets.
Moderators
Kathleen Canning
Dean, School of Humanities, Rice University
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of History | Affiliated Faculty, Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality
Kathleen Canning is a historian of Germany and modern Europe, who joined Rice University as Dean of Humanities in 2018. She was previously Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Michigan. Her most recent scholarship focuses on the history of citizenship and democracy in interwar Germany.
At Rice, Dean Canning has developed a strategic vision for a more fully integrated and connective humanities at Rice. This connective ambition includes: meaningful engagement of the humanities with the sciences, through programs such as Medical Humanities; Environmental Studies; and Science and Technology Studies; connecting the local to the global through the advancement of world histories, cultures and languages; new investments in the visual arts and creative writing, embodied in Susan and Fayez Sarofim Hall, the new home for the student arts on the ground of the former Rice Media Center; and the connection of our Rice humanities and arts classrooms to the City of Houston and the Gulf Coast.
Fay A. Yarbrough
William Gaines Twyman Professor of History, Rice University | Associate Dean of Faculty and Graduate Programs, School of Humanities | Affiliated Faculty, Center for African and African American Studies | Affiliated Faculty, Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality | Studied history and political science at Rice, 1997
Fay A. Yarbrough is a historian of the 19th-century United States, whose research interest is at the intersection of Native, African American and Southern history. She is particularly interested in the interactions between Indigenous peoples and people of African descent.
Her most recent book is Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country, which examines Choctaw Indians’ participation in the American Civil War. Her first book, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century, explores the complex relationship between the construction of sexual boundaries and the formation of tribal and racial identities.