O'Connell Initiative Events
2025
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.