5:00-6:00pm
Speaker: Professor Margaret Newell (Ohio State University & Mary Ball Washington Scholar in History (Fulbright Ireland), UCD)
Title: Before the underground railroad: Native Americans and Africans escaping slavery in Colonial America and the people who helped them
Margaret Ellen Newell is Professor of early American History at Ohio State University and currently Mary Ball Washington Scholar in History (Fulbright Ireland) at University College Dublin).
Her publications include From Dependency to Independence: economic revolution in colonial New England (Ithaca, New York: Cornwell University Press, 2015), and the groundbreaking Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Cornwell University Press, 2015) (winner of the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians for the best book on race relations in the U.S. and Peter Gomes Prize for non-fiction. Recently, Newell published articles on Native Americans who escaped slavery, on slave testimony, and on Indigenous uprisings across the Western Hemisphere in 1676. She leads a research project on African American and Native American citizenship, 1780-1950. Professor Newell has appeared in a documentary on Native American slavery and the podcast Ben Franklin’s World, and her lectures on revolutionary constitutions have been televised.
She is currently working on a biography of William and Ellen Craft who fled slavery to fight for Black freedom across three continents and is Principal Investigator of a Mellon Foundation Higher Learning Grant (2023-2026).
---------------------------------------------------------------
6:00-7:15pm
Speaker: Professor Dr Hannes Grandits (Humboldt University of Berlin)
Title: How empires end, or not end: the Eastern crisis and the end of the Ottoman rule in Bosnia, 1875-78
Professor Grandits has held positions in many Universities and institutes including the Institute of History – Department of Southeast European History at the University of Graz, the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), the Center for Comparative European History (ZVGE) in Berlin, the Institute of History at the University of Graz, the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Since 2010, he has been a professor of Southeast European history at the Humboldt University of Berlin and has participated in or led various research collaborations and projects. From 2015 to 2016 and again from 2012 to 2023, he was Managing Director of the Institute of History at Humboldt University of Berlin.
Professor Grandits’ most recent publications include Kosovo in the Yugoslav 1980s (special issue of Comparative Southeast European Studies), edited with Robert Pichler, Ruža Fotiadis (Oldenbourg: DeGruyter, 2021); The End of Ottoman Rule in Bosnia. Conflicting Agencies and Imperial Appropriations (Abingdon, New York: Routledge, 2022) also published in Bosnian translation in 2023; Handbook of the History of Southeastern Europe. Vol. 39: Statehood and Politics in Southeastern Europe after 1800, edited with Konrad Clewing (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2024), and The Disputed Austro-Hungarian Border: Agendas, Actors, and Practices in Western Hungary/Burgenland after World War I, edited with Ibolya Murber and Katharina Tyran (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2025).