Archaeology Lectures: Gender in Ancient Egypt

“Hatshepsut: Women and Power” August 25, 2008 (Monday) 2:20 PM Roberts 419, UAH

“Androgyny and Blurred Boundaries in Ancient Egypt” August 25, 2008 (Monday) 7:30 PM Chan Auditorium, UAH

Dr. Ann Macy Roth is currently the Director of the Giza Cemetery Project and has spent considerable time in Egypt pursuing her research. She teaches as the Clinical Associate Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and Art History at New York University. Dr. Macy Roth investigates questions of gender, wealth, and rank evident in cemeteries.

In her daytime lecture, Dr. Macy Roth will discuss the famous female pharaoh Hatshepsut. In her evening talk she will explore how the ancient Egyptians believed that to maintain the universe, they needed to maintain the boundaries between things. Since one of the principal boundaries in their universe was the distinction between male and female, it is curious that there is so much evidence, in both the political and the religious realms, for the blurring of that distinction. Androgyny occurs both in literary sources and in representations in tombs and temples. This talk will present examples of this androgyny and discuss some possible reasons for the blurring of gender boundaries.

Please come and bring a friend! For more information, contact Dr. Lillian Joyce, President of the North Alabama Society of the Archaeological Institute of America, at JoyceL@uah.edu

Classics Week 2008: Dr. Nathan Rosenstein on Roman Military History

The Society for Ancient Languages and the History Department at UAH are pleased to announce 2008 Classics Week featuring Dr. Nathan Rosenstein, a professor of history at The Ohio State University.

Dr. Rosenstein, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, is a specialist in the history of the Roman Republic and early Empire. He is the author of Imperatores Victi: Military Defeat and Aristocratic Competition in the Middle and Late Republic (1990), Rome at War: Farms, Families, and Death in the Middle Republic (2004) and co-editor, along with Kurt Raaflaub, of War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (1999) and, with Robert Morstein-Marx, of A Companion to the Roman Republic.

Dr. Rosenstein will give two public lectures on Friday April 4, 2008, both in Roberts Hall 419 (the art history lecture hall):

12:00 noon: "Phalanges in Rome?"

7:00 p.m.: "War and State Formation: Republican Rome and Warring States in China"

Please come and bring a friend! For more information, contact society.latin@gmail.com

AIA TALKS: King's Handkerchief and Angkor Wat

Dr. Robert Brown LA County Museum & UCLA will talk on “The King’s Handkerchief: Royal Power at Angkor Wat in Cambodia” on Mar 27, 2008 (Thurs) at 7:30 PM in Shelby Hall, Room 107.

After graduation from the University of New Mexico, Dr. Brown joined the Peace Corps and worked as an English teacher in Thailand from 1966-1968, which furthered his interest in the cultures of Southeast Asia. His two years in the Peace Corps were in turn followed by three years of service in the US Army. After teaching English as a Second Language in the Los Angeles County School system, Professor Brown began his formal study of Southeast Asia art, earning his MA and PhD from UCLA in Indian Art History. Currently, he is both a Full Professor at UCLA and the Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Dr. Brown has received numerous grants, including a Donner Foundation Grant, a Pacific Rim Grant, and a Carpenter Foundation Grant. He is author of The Dvaravati Wheels of the Law and the Indianization of South East Asia and editor of Ganesh: Studies of an Asian God, Living a Life in Accord with Dhamma, Art from Thailand, and The Roots of Tantra.

Dr. Brown's talk on "The King's Handkerchief: Royal Power at Angkor Wat in Cambodia" will describe two stone relief portraits of King Suryavarman II among the stone relief carvings at Angkor Wat. Suryavarman built Angkor Wat in the 12th century, in part as a heaven on earth. Portraits are almost non-existent inSoutheast Asian art before those at Angkor Wat. One shows the King holding two unusual and unique objects. The talk attempts to identify the objects and relate them to his power as king and to the symbolism of the monument.

The next day, Dr. Brown will lecture on “Royal Burials and Buddha Relics” Mar 28, 2008 (Friday) 12:30 PM Shelby, Room 109. Several royal burials were excavated by the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1970s. The contents of these burials, located at Tilya Tepe, are used to argue that the use of relic deposits in Buddhist stupas in Ghandhara, an area that today includes parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, are related to kingly burials. That is, the relics carry as much a royal meaning as a Buddhist one.

Award-Winning Historian Dr. Michael Neufeld to Speak on Wernher von Braun Feb. 26 and Feb. 28

Dr. Michael Neufeld, Chair of the Space History Division at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution and author of Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (Knopf, 2007), will give two public lectures the last week in February.

TUESDAY FEBRUARY 26
"Wernher von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War"
7:30 p.m.
Roberts Recital Hall, UAH
Book signing following the talk

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 28
"Space Hero or Nazi Villain? Wernher von Braun as Cold War Icon"
11:10 a.m.
Frank Franz Hall, UAH
(as part of the UAH Honors Forum)

Dr. Neufeld's biography of von Braun was just chosen as the winner of the 2008 Richard W. Leopold Prize of the Organization of American Historians. The Leopold Prize is given by the Organization of American Historians every two years for the best book written by a historian connected with federal, state or municipal government.

Neufeld's book has been critically acclaimed by the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the L.A. Times Book Review, the Washington Post, and the Financial Times of London. Neufeld also discussed his book on NPR’s Talk of the Nation in October and with the Smithsonian's Air and Space Magazine.

Neufeld is visiting UAH as a Humanities Center Short-Term Eminent Scholar.

Public Lectures on the History of Ghana: Thursday February 21

The UAH Global Studies Program, in cooperation with the Honors Forum and the History Department, is pleased to announce two upcoming lectures by Dr. Jean Allman, an African history specialist at Washington University in St. Louis.

Her main public lecture, on Thursday, February 21 at 7:30 in the Shelby Center, Room 109, is entitled ““Nuclear Imperialism and the Pan-African Struggle for Peace and Freedom: Ghana, 1959-1962.” The talk will explore Pan-Africanism, African nationalism, and movements for independence through a close focus on the relationship between struggles for the liberation of the continent from colonial rule and pacifist movements in opposition to nuclear armament. The movement against nuclear imperialism that took root in the Pan African freedom struggle not only showcases the “global” and the “transnational” in ways that need to be recovered, but stands as a counter-narrative, a corrective, to the afro-pessimism that has so dominated scholarship on Africa since the 1980s.

Dr. Allman will also give a lecture as part of the UAH Honors Forum. The lecture, at 11:10 a.m. on February 21 in Frank Franz Hall, is entitled "The Disappearing of Hannah Kudjoe: Nationalism, Feminism, and the Tyrannies of History."

Dr. Allman has written The Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana, 1954-1957 (1993) and co-written TONGNAAB: The History of a West African God (2005) and "I Will Not Eat Stone": A Women’s History of Colonial Asante (2000). She has also edited several volumes and published over 25 articles. She has also served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora and for the African Studies Association.

AIA Talk: Early Peoples of Eastern North America

Dr. David Anderson will discuss “First Peopling to Monumental Architecture in Eastern North America” in Chan Auditorium at 7:30 PM on 4 February 2008. Our first speaker's talk will build upon and possibly challenge the suggestions that Dr. James Adovasio made in his engaging spring 2007 lecture on Paleolithic culture and the peopling of the Americas. For his University of Michigan PhD dissertation, "Political Change in Chiefdom Societies: Cycling in the Late Prehistoric Southeastern United States," Dr. Anderson received national recognition by winning the Society for American Archaeology's (SAA) prestigious Dissertation Prize. The SAA honored Dr. Anderson again in 1997 and 1999 with its Presidential Recognition Award and its Excellence in Cultural Resource Management Research Award. After a fascinating career with the National Park Service, which had Anderson working from the Caribbean to New Mexico to Shiloh, TN, he joined the anthropology faculty at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he has been teaching since 2004. The University of Alabama Press has published four of his last five books. His most recent tome, co-authored with K. Maasch and D. Sandsweiss, explores a timely issue that also had implications for past cultures: Climate Change and Cultural Dynamics: A Global Perspective on Mid-Holocene Transitions.

Mark Your Calendars! Dr. Michael Neufeld to Speak on Wernher von Braun

The UAH History Department is delighted to announce the upcoming visit of Dr. Michael Neufeld, the chair of the Space History Division at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. Neufeld has just published Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (Knopf, 2007), a pathbreaking biography that has been widely praised by the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the L.A. Times Book Review, and the Washington Post. Neufeld also discussed his book on NPR’s Talk of the Nation in October.

Dr. Neufeld will be in Huntsville from February 25 to February 29 as a Humanities Center Short-Term Eminent Scholar. He will give two public lectures, one on "Wernher Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War" on Tuesday February 26 at 7:30 p.m. in Roberts Recital Hall, and a second on "Space Hero or Nazi Villain?: Wernher von Braun as Cold War Icon" as part of the UAH Honors Forum on Thursday February 28 at 11:10 a.m. in Frank Franz Hall. He will also lead discussions with students enrolled in Dr. Dunar's "U.S. Foreign Policy since 1920," Dr. Waring's "Modern America," and Dr. Johnson's "Studies in Modern Europe" classes.

Mark your Calendars!