History Department Events

Upcoming Events

Our department holds many events throughout the academic year, and there are numerous other events held around Fordham campuses which may be of interest. We update our list regularly to advertise new events.

For more information about the events hosted by the Center of Medieval Studies and the Jewish Studies department, please view their webpages.

  • Wednesday, November 19 | 1:00pm

    Rose Hill Campus, McShane Center, Room 112
    441 E. Fordham Road

    Book Talk followed by career professional development discussion
    "The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval & Reformation England"

    Dr. Esther Liberman Cuenca
    Associate Professor, Texas A&M University - Victoria

    (Sponsored by the O'Connell Initiative for the Global History of Capitalism and the Center for Medieval Studies)


    Monday, November 10 | 12:00pm

    Lincoln Center Campus, McNally Amphitheater
    140 W. 62nd Street

    "The Soundscapes Experience"

    Join us for an evening exploring the rhythms, voices, and memories that have shaped New York City’s sonic identity.   This event bridges the city’s musical past and present through conversation and performance.

    The evening will open with a conversation between Dr. Mark Naison—professor of history at Fordham and director of the Bronx African American History Project—and Fordham professor Ryan Purcell, creator and host of the Soundscapes NYC podcast. Dr. Naison will reflect on the soundscapes of his youth growing up in 1950s Brooklyn, from the street-corner harmonies of neighborhood “doo-wop” and early rock and roll groups to the social spaces where music connected communities and defined the urban experience. His stories will bring to life an era when the city’s sidewalks, parks, and stoops were alive with song, rhythm, and improvisation.

    Following the conversation, the evening will shift from memory to music with a live performance that reimagines the “doo-wop” tradition for a new generation. Emerging artist Nora Flamer, a Fordham alumna whose work blends vintage harmonies with contemporary soul, will present selections from her forthcoming EP. Performing in dialogue with a live “doo-wop” vocal group, Flamer’s set creates a sonic bridge between mid-century New York and today’s creative voices, showing how the city’s musical spirit continues to evolve while echoing its roots.

    Presented by the Department of History, Bronx African American History Project, Moment NYC, and the Soundscapes NYC Podcast. 

    Tuesday, April 15 | 1:00pm

    Rose Hill Campus, Hughes Hall, room 212
    441 East Fordham Road

    "Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World"
     
    Today, free trade is often associated with right-wing free marketeers. In Pax Economica, historian Dr. Marc-William Palen (University of Exeter) shows that free trade and globalisation in fact have roots in nineteenth-century left-wing politics. In this counterhistory of an idea, Palen explores how, beginning in the 1840s, left-wing globalists became the leaders of the peace and anti-imperialist movements of their age. By the early twentieth century, an unlikely alliance of liberal radicals, socialist internationalists, feminists, and Christians envisioned free trade as essential for a prosperous and peaceful world order. Of course, this vision was at odds with the era’s strong predilections for nationalism, protectionism, geopolitical conflict, and colonial expansion. Palen reveals how, for some of its most radical left-wing adherents, free trade represented a hard-nosed critique of imperialism, militarism, and war. Palen shows that the anti-imperial component of free trade was a phenomenon that came to encompass the political left wing within the British, American, Spanish, German, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, Russian, French, and Japanese empires. The left-wing vision of a “pax economica” evolved to include supranational regulation to maintain a peaceful free-trading system―which paved the way for a more liberal economic order after World War II and such institutions as the United Nations, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization. Rediscovering the left-wing history of globalism offers timely lessons for our own era of economic nationalism and geopolitical conflict.

    Wednesday, 26 March | 5:00pm

    Lincoln Center Campus, McNally Amphitheater
    140 W.  62nd Street

    Revisiting the Birth of the Atomic Age:  The History and Memory of the Manhattan Project

    Join speakers Dr. Alex Wellerstein (Stevens Institute of Technology), author of Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Myrriah Gómez (University of New Mexico), author of Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos (University of Arizona Press, 2022), and Patrick H. Willems (Filmmaker), director of The Dinner Plan (2025), Night of the Coconut (2022), as they discuss  the memory of the Manhattan Project among both historians and the public, the social and environmental effects of nuclear testing in the American southwest, and the depiction of atomic weapons in Hollywood and global cinema.

     

    Thursday, February 13 | 5:00pm

    Lincoln Center Campus, South Lounge
    113 W. 60 Street

    Monetary Pluralism and East India Company Rule in Eighteenth-Century Eastern India
    Andrew Sartori, New York University

    Eighteenth-century India was characterized by a highly monetized constellation of commercial relations that Keynes would surely have considered a "monetary economy... an economy in which money plays a part of its own and affects motives and decisions” rather than functioning as a neutral mediator of real exchanges of goods and services. But like many other places in this period, albeit to an extreme degree, the "monetariness" of this economy to a great degree presented itself in the experiential form of a plurality of monies -- that is, plural monetary circuits functioning on the basis of highly conditional and limited cross-currency convertibility that interacted through the mediation of a complex exchange market operating at the limits of state power. Given these factors, Dr. Sartori will discuss the specific monetary features of extractive strategies in the borderlands of British India, and how we might better incorporate money as a feature of colonial extractive economies.
     
    Andrew Sartori is a historian of South Asia and imperial Britain. His work focuses on the relationship between concept-formation and the social practices associated with modern capitalism.