Talk by Robert P. Emlen, Brown University Curator and Senior Lecturer in American Studies 235 years ago this month Prince Greene, an African American soldier of the First Rhode Island Regiment, shot and killed a white man named Edward Allen who, with a friend, was throwing rocks at the Company barracks and kicked down the door in the middle of the night. At his trial four days later Greene was convicted of manslaughter, was branded on the hand, and returned to duty.

Meet and Mingle with current and former students in the Master's in Public Humanities Program. The Center for Public Humanities will host a reception including a brief presentation about the Public Humanities Masters Program at Brown. Learn more about the degree, ask questions, and stay for the screening of a documentary produced by program alumna, Amanda Murray, '08 who will be on site to talk informally about how the Public Humanities program informed her career trajectory.

Christina Bevilacqua, Director of Programs and Public Engagement, founded and runs the weekly Salon Series at the Providence Athenaeum which for nearly nine years has featured guest lectures, community discussions, libations, and a revival of the salon culture that once played a pivotal role in the intellectual and cultural development of social groups, societies, and even countries.

Dietrich Neumann, Professor, Departments of History of Art and Architecture, Urban Studies and Italian Studies; Director of Urban Studies will deliver the first Public Humanities Fellows Luncheon Lecture. Working with his students, Professor Neumann developed an Iphone App, called “Brown Facades” which provides a mobile tour of Brown architecture. Currently, a new group of students is working on a major upgrade of the App with much additional contents and new features.

The Public Humanities Alumni Panel welcomes back graduates to reflect on the role of the public humanities program in their career trajectories. This year, panelists include:

Elizabeth Manekin, '09 (Museum Educator at the Yale University Art Gallery),

Meg Rotzel, '10 (Producer of Artists in Residence and Public Programs at MIT),

Reina Shibata, '10, Deputy Director, Percent for Art at NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and

Museums are by their nature experienced with intermittent attentiveness. I have devoted much of my career to locating historical themes and narratives, and constructing engaging experiences, that could bridge the gaps in a visitor's attention. Now I want to raise some fresh questions: Does this privilege a certain kind of cognitive style, at the cost of others? Do new forms of social and technological media therefore require a rethinking of the public history enterprise?

The general problem of deriving information (intelligence, actionable data, orienting indices) from “objects” has long preoccupied scientists, philosophers, and members of the clandestine services. New documentation has recently come to light that bears on this important subject, and a full airing of these striking sources is urgently wanted. In brief, there are now reasons to believe that individuals apparently associated with the CIA may well have embarked, in the early 1960s, on a notably non-traditional program of interrogatory investigations into the secret life of brute matter.

In the fall of 2015, Amy Remensnyder taught a course about the history of prison and captivity both at Brown and to incarcerated men at the Rhode Island Adult Correctional Institute. In this talk, she reflects on this teaching experiment, focusing on the complex role played by the prisoner-students' own experiences of captivity in shaping the perspective of all course participants on the history of this form of suffering.

Join the leaders of three historical organizations for a discussion of the representation of slavery in recent exhibits and public programs and the impact of those initiatives on visitors, staff, and mission.

Artist's Lecture: Since 2005, Christopher Sims has been making photographs within fictitious Iraqi and Afghan villages on the training grounds of U.S. military bases as well as photographing daily life at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station. A former photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, he is the Undergraduate Education Director at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Jihad Lamp, Fort Polk, Louisiana. 2006. Photograph by Christopher Sims