Retroviral Cultures: AIDS, Twenty Years On 1 December 2016, 2.00 PM - 6.00 PM Andrew Blades, Maria Vaccarella, Corinne Squire, MK Czerwiec Old Council Chamber, Wills Memorial Building 2016 marks the twentieth anniversary of the 11th International AIDS Conference in Vancouver, at which Taiwanese American researcher David Ho and his team revealed new antiretroviral combination therapies to the world. Before long, Andrew Sullivan was (in)famously writing in the New York Times of the 'end' of AIDS. Twenty years on, the global AIDS pandemic continues, and in the USA there are still 1.2 million people living with HIV. Cultural representations of HIV/AIDS in America – literature, film, television, art – no longer portray AIDS as a death sentence or as a ‘rupture in meaning’ (Edmund White); depending on access to healthcare and education, HIV is primarily a manageable long-term health condition. At the same time, Richard Canning has pondered that the […]

Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World University of Montpellier, France, 1-2 December, 2016 Keynote Speakers Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard University) Christine Chivallon (Research Director, CNRS) In Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (2001),  Ron Eyerman explores the formation of African American identity through the cultural trauma of slavery. While trauma directly affected individuals who experienced slavery, Eyerman argues that, as a cultural process, trauma is "mediated through various forms of representation and linked to the reformation of collective identity and the reworking of collective memory". This international conference seeks to examine the foundation, the mechanisms and the scope of these memorial processes. It endeavors to explore a reality of slavery that rests on human memory, on a (re)constructed memory of individual, collective or family trajectories and migrations transmitted from generation to generation. The Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World conference sets out to interrogate how descendants reconstruct the history of their ancestors […]

Cambridge American History Seminar For further details, pre-circulated papers and other seminars see the CAHS webpage. 28 November: Loïc Wacquant, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, and 2016-17 Pitt Professor, University of Cambridge Peculiar Institutions: Four Centuries of Race-Making in the United States Discussion will be based on a pre-circulated paper