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Visiting Fellow Archive (2013-2014)

The 2013-2014 Visiting Fellow is Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University

ABOUT


Richard White
Margaret Byrne Professor of American History
Stanford University

Wednesday, April 2, 2014, 04:00 PM
Lecture: “California Time” by Richard White

Landscapes as the eye takes them in seem relentlessly set in the present, but they actually mingle the past, the present, and a potential future.  Photographs capture the temporal simultaneity of past, present, and, if not the future, our ambitions for it. These images are palimpsests; they need to be unpacked.  Each picture demands a thousand words, and to create a history from photographs involves a conjunction of image and story.  I am after what is immediately visible in these places but also the ghosts that inhabit these photographs and the directions in which they gesture.

Thursday, April 3, 2014, 03:00 PM
Seminar: “Visualizing Narratives” by Richard White

Seminar Topic will be built around the lecture “California Time” and be organized around the interplay of gold and new technologies and narrative history.
Recommended Seminar Reading:  Berger, John. “Uses of Photography.”  About Looking.  New York:  Random House, 1980.  48-63.

The 2013-14 Visiting Fellow will be Richard White, the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University.   Richard White is widely regarded as one of the nation’s leading scholars in three related fields: the American West, Native American history and environmental history. Professor White is the author of five books, including The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republic in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, which was named a finalist for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize.  Among other honors, he is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. His latest book, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America won the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

Professor White is the principal investigator for the “Shaping the West”, a project in the Spatial History Lab at Stanford University, which explores the construction of space by transcontinental railroads during the late nineteenth-century. By connecting data analysis and complex visualization graphical algorithms with traditional historical sources, Professor White’s team is examining historic perceptions of space in the newly settled American West.

Richard White will be in residence at UIC from March 31- April 4, 2014, offering a public lecture and a seminar. The lecture is open to the public. The seminar is open to faculty and advanced graduate students. Please, preregister using the below form.  Preregistration is not required but is highly recommended.