Past Brown Bag Sessions



Domestic Carceral Labor: Race, Gender, and the Transformation of Punishment at Eastern State Penitentiary

Brown Bag Session
Whitney Fields, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Nov 20, 2024 at -

Whitney N. Fields is a PhD Candidate in History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She received a B.A. in History and American Studies from the College of William and Mary in 2015. Her work combines carceral studies,…



Opera, Pantomime, and Circus in late 18th-century Montréal

Brown Bag Session
Elizabeth Rouget, Princeton University
Oct 23, 2024 at -

Elizabeth Rouget is a PhD candidate at Princeton University completing her dissertation titled “Dance as Translation: Establishing French Opéra-Comique, Ballet, and Circus in Early North America, 1780-1810.” Following…



“Our Coming to America”: Remembering the Middle Passage in the Colored Conventions

Brown Bag Session
Courtney Murray, Pennsylvania State University
Oct 9, 2024 at -

Courtney Murray is a Dual-Title PhD Candidate in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University and a #DigBlk Scholar at the Center for Black Digital Research (CBDR). Her…



The Absent Imperiled Soul: Absence, Captivity, and Religion in colonial New England and Quebec

Brown Bag Session
Emma Chapman, University of California, Davis, and Library Company of Philadelphia
Oct 2, 2024 at -

Emma Chapman is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis. She studies gender, economy, and family structures in early New England and New France. She has worked on multiple public history projects with…



A Natural History of Nursing

Brown Bag Session
Lilith Todd, Columbia University
Sep 18, 2024 at -

Lilith Todd is a PhD candidate in English & Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her dissertation, "Tending Another," describes the rhetoric and labor of nursing in the long eighteenth century and within a…



“Is Death Not Preferable to Slavery?”: Resistance and Diaspora in the Circum-Gulf Region, 1729-1769

Brown Bag Session
Leila K. Blackbird, University of Chicago
May 1, 2024 at -

Leila K. Blackbird (Louisiana Creole, unenrolled adoptee of Apache-Cherokee descent) is currently the Pozen Human Rights Doctoral Fellow of US & Atlantic History at the University of Chicago. She also serves as the…



“An Affair of So Much Consideration”: The Molasses Act Controversy, 1730-33

Brown Bag Session
Eva Landsberg, Yale University
Apr 17, 2024 at -

Papers are circulated in advance. For copies, please contact the McNeil Center office. --



Citizens and Subjects: Gambling on Belonging in the Nineteenth Century Native Great Lakes

Brown Bag Session
Elena Ryan, Princeton University
Apr 3, 2024 at -

Papers are circulated in advance. For copies, please contact the McNeil Center office.



“Of virtue becoming their situation”: The Making of Refugee Women's Religious Communities in the 19th-Century Mid-Atlantic

Brown Bag Session
Taneil Ruffin, Princeton University
Mar 20, 2024 at -

Papers are circulated in advance. For copies, please contact the McNeil Center office.



“Distressing the distressed”: Poverty and Rent Distraint in Early Republic New York

Brown Bag Session
Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Mar 6, 2024 at -

Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan is Assistant Teaching Professor and Coordinator of the Undergraduate Public History Program and Graduate Public Humanities Program at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. She holds a PhD in…