Chabraja Center Happenings
Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies
By Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch
In Fall 2024 Amy Stanley returned to the Center as Director after her Guggenheim Fellowship year. She presided over an intellectually stimulating program of CCHS events, including lunch lectures, joint lectures, and faculty conferences.
The year began with our annual Fall “Ice Cream Lecture,” delivered by Melissa Macauley on “The Politics of Commemoration in Post-Mao China,” in which she shared with us some of her personal recollections of the Tiananmen Square protests.
CCHS lunch lectures included a range of speakers and topics, from the history of Black women’s incarceration in the USA, by Talitha LeFouria (U of Texas at Austin) and the mechanisms of slave emancipation in Spain and the Spanish Empire by Michelle McKinley (U of Oregon) to Harvard historian Serhii Plokhii’s look at the Russo-Ukrainian war through a historical lens.
Joint lectures with the Holocaust Education Foundation of Northwestern and the Center for African American History, as well as the Boyce Lecture in Medieval Studies and the annual History of the Book lecture, offered Northwesterners and the larger community a variety of historical explorations. In addition, throughout the year historians shared their works-in-progress—on Mughal history, the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and Korean immigrants in Japan—in workshops for the History Department. The Center held its annual event celebrating newly published books by faculty of the department to coincide with the March 2025 visit of prospective History graduate students to Northwestern.
A slew of co-sponsored events added to the variety of the CCHS calendar. These included two faculty conferences, supported by the CCHS Conference Initiative: “Caring for the Dead: Ancestor Veneration, Religious Encounters, and the State in the Mongol Empire and Africa” in early April (convened by Jonathan Brack, Sean Hanretta, and Akin Ogundiran) and “Paper People: Documentation, Identity, and Citizenship in U.S. History” in early May (convened by Susan Pearson).
The CCHS global partnership with the School of History at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) took eight graduate students to London for a symposium where paired NU and QMUL graduates presented their research.
The Center’s formal associates -- three Teaching Postdoctoral Fellows, one Postdoctoral Fellow in Public History, three Breen Graduate Fellows and one Quinn Graduate Fellow – contributed to the Center’s vibrance. The Spring was busy with selection of next year’s postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate fellows, and with choosing summer Public History graduate fellows for the coming summer.
The popular Leopold Fellowship program included forty undergrads who worked on History faculty projects and convened to present their research at the end of each quarter. Undergraduates also benefited from the CCHS Teaching Initiative supporting the creation of new, broad-ranging History classes. This year these were Caitlin Fitz’s “Global History of Women’s Sports” and Helen Tilley’s “Global Legal History” class (both offered in Winter 2025).
Once again, this was a busy and successful year. Learn more on the CCHS website.