O'Connell Initiative Past Events
2023
Slavery's Capitalism and the Para-Archive in Nineteenth Century Salvador da Bahia
Mary Hicks, University of Chicago
Friday, March 24 | 1:00pm
Fordham University Lincoln Center Campus
Gabelli School of Business
140 West, Classroom 334
Dr. Mary Hicks is a historian of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on transnational histories of race, slavery, capitalism, migration and the making of the early modern world. Her first book, Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835, reimagines the history of Portuguese exploration, colonization and oceanic commerce from the perspective of enslaved and freed black seamen laboring in the transatlantic slave trade. As the Atlantic world’s first subaltern cosmopolitans, black mariners, she argues, were integral in forging a unique commercial culture that linked the politics, economies and people of Salvador da Bahia with those of the Bight of Benin.
On Our Own Terms: Alternatives to Capitalist Modernization in Cold War Guatamala
Sarah Foss, Oklahoma State University
Wednesday March 1 | 11:30am
Fordham University Lincoln Center Campus
Gabelli School of Business
140 West, Classroom 334
Dr. Sarah Foss is an assistant professor of history at Oklahoma State University. Her work focuses on the politics of Cold War era international development projects in Latin America and the ways that Indigenous people interacted with, and often appropriated, these projects. Contrary to American project planners' expectations about modernization and development, indigenous beneficiaries were not passive recipients but actively engaged with development interventions and, in the process, redefined racialized ideas about Indigeneity.
2022
Carework and the Hidden Labor of Capitalism: Bringing the History of Caregiving to the History of Capitalism
"Carework and the Hidden Labor of Capitalism" brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the problem of 20th-century capitalist transformation and the "crisis of care" that has accompanied it.
Fordham University
Thursday, October 20 – Saturday, October 22, 2022
The "Carework and the Hidden Labor of Capitalism" conference could not happen at a more opportune moment. The Covid-19 pandemic vaulted unpaid caregiving, paid care work, and capitalism’s habits of exploiting the women who bear the brunt of this work into public consciousness. But for several years before Covid-19 and its unequal ramifications arrived on the scene scholars of gender and labor had already been turning with renewed attention to capitalism and the problem of social reproduction. Historians—as well as feminist economists, sociologists, and others—had begun to probe the historical roots and dimensions of our contemporary “crisis of care.” Bringing this emergent group of scholars together now is an opportunity to add scholarly heft to public debate.
The conference will also tackle a crucial missing hole in the burgeoning study of capitalism. Calls to “engender capitalism” have proliferated in recent years. What women’s and gender historians have long known is that there is no capitalism apart from gender constructs. Crucially, capitalism produced gender by recruiting women into certain work sites and into unpaid care labor. In turn, that gendered reproductive, caregiving, and social-reproductive labor kept capitalism afloat. To take on the project of engendering capitalism is to open up a wide array of big questions that promise new lines of inquiry and new insights.
One such question brings the problem of paid and unpaid carework front and center in the history of capitalism. As historians Tracey Deutsch and Nan Enstad have recently framed it: “What does an economy look like if we start with carework, or with the question of how people get what they need rather than how they produce a commodity?” This question will be the launching point for the conference.
The World that Latin America Created: Capitalism and Development in the Post-WWII Era
Dr. Margarita Fajardo, Sarah Lawrence College
Thursday, March 3, 2022 | 1:00 pm
Dr. Fajardo is a graduate of Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia and Princeton University. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Duke University. She is the author of The World that Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Development Era, published in February 2022 with Harvard University Press, as well as articles in Latin American Research Review, Cold War Science, and other outlets.
Reeducation Camps and the Politics of Morality and Citizenship in Socialist Mozambique
Dr. Benedito Machava, Yale University
Thursday, March 31, 2022 | 1:00 pm
Dr. Machava is a historian of colonial and post-colonial Africa. Raised and educated in Mozambique, he received his PhD at Michigan University in 2018. His research focuses on liberation struggles, decolonization, nation building, socialism and socialist experiments in Africa. His current book manuscript, The Morality of Revolution: Reeducation Camps and the Carceral Regime in Socialist Mozambique, 1974-1990, examines the politics of public morality, carcerality/punishment and citizenship in post-independence Mozambique. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, among others.
Additional Past Events
Dr. Victoria Smolkin (Wesleyan University) "A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism"
Westenley Alcenat (Fordham University) “We Are Not What We Seem: The Wealth of American Capitalism and the ‘Exceptionalism’ of Haitian Poverty”
Bathsheba Demuth (Brown University) “The Ethical Choice of Whales: Bowheads, Hunters, and the Nature of History”
Sheila Fitzpatrick (University of Sydney) “Who Owned Europe’s Postwar ‘Displaced Persons’? A Cold War Tussle Between the Soviet Union and Its ‘Capitalist’ Wartime Allies, 1945-50”
Gabrielle Hecht (Stanford) “Residual Governance: Mining Afterlives and Molecular Colonialism, seen from an African Anthropocene”
Peter Hudson (UCLA) "The African Origins of Racial Capitalism"
Tariq Omar Ali (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign) “A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta”
Book launch for Dr. Kirsten Swinth's new book “Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family” in conversation with Jennifer Mittelstadt (Rutgers).
“Unveiling Money: Counterfeits, Arbitrage, and Finance across the Arabian Sea”, based on Dr. Johan Mathew’s recent book Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism Across the Arabian Sea (University of California Press, 2016).
Talk by Dr. Daniel Immerwahr (Northwestern University), “Fireball Express: How the U.S. Military Laid the Foundations for Globalization”
Conference on “The United States and Global Capitalism in the Twentieth Century” at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus
Talk by Dr. Vanessa Ogle (University of California-Berkeley), “Twilight Capitalists: The Global Cold War and the Unmaking of Postwar Capitalism”
Book launch event for Dr. Yuko Miki for her new book Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Colonial Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Discussant, Dr. Amy Chazkel (CUNY - Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center)
Lunch with Dr. Dave Hamlin and Dr. Samantha Iyer on their work supported by the O’Connell Initiative
Book launch event for Dr. Christopher R. W. Dietrich for his new book Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Discussant, Dr. Toby C. Jones (Rutgers University).