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What Happens After a Pope Dies

Come learn about the ancient traditions surrounding a papal transition in the Catholic Church with Donald Prudlo, Ph.D., Warren Professor of Catholic Studies. Q&A to follow. Free and open to the public.

The State of Sequoyah

Join us at the Helmerich Center for American Research for an evening with Professor Don Fixico (Shawnee, Sac and Fox, Muscogee Creek and Seminole), the Regents’ Professor of Historical Studies at Arizona State University. Professor Fixico will talk about his new book, The State of Sequoyah: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Quest for an Indian State, published by the University of Oklahoma Press in October 2024. After the talk, books will be available for sale from Magic City Books, and Professor Fixico will be available for a book-signing. Event is FREE and open to the public.

Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity XVI

The sixteenth biennial conference organized by the Society for Late Antiquity. The conference’s theme is gender, identity, and authority in Late Antiquity. Thirty scholars from around the globe will present their original research. There will also be two keynote lectures, one by Virginia Burrus (Syracuse University) and the other by Michele R. Salzman (UC-Riverside). Late registration (after 3/5) includes access to all events but excludes food.

Works-In-Progress Seminar

WIP Seminar featuring Billy Smith, Director of the Helmerich Center for American Research and Applied Associate Professor in the History Department!

Join us to engage Billy’s new research and discuss his paper, “Sounding Sovereignty: Cherokee Hymn Books and the Protean Legacy of Isaac Watts.”
From the first appearance of the Cherokee Hymn Book in 1829 through multiple editions that followed, Cherokees have translated, printed, and sung the hymns of Isaac Watts in their own language. This paper examines his little known legacy within Cherokee culture. The 1829 Hymn Book was created in partnership between Cherokee converts and white missionaries. It became the first book ever published in the Cherokee syllabary. This paper argues that Watts’ hymns, and the printed hymn books that carried them, offered a protean colonial technology that Cherokee people adapted to their own needs. The hymn book represents a material expression of Cherokee community, identity, and sovereignty. In the lead-up to the removal crisis, it served the joint purposes of defending Cherokee “civilization” to white settlers and uniting Cherokees through print and song. Cherokees and missionaries drew from the deep supply of Watts’ devotional poems as they constructed the Hymn Book and wove them into the Cherokee cultural lexicon where the body of hymn texts remain in use today.

Pre-Law Panel Discussion

Interested in pre-law? Join us for a panel discussion featuring Judge Doris Fransein and three local attorneys who graduated from UTulsa and practice law in Tulsa.

Cadenhead-Settle Lecture featuring Ussama Makdisi (UC-Berkeley)

Ussama Makdisi is a Palestinian American historian, specializing in the history of the modern Middle East.

He is May Ziadeh Chair in Palestinian & Arab Studies and Chancellor’s Chair at the University of California Berkeley. Makdisi is also faculty director for the Program in Palestinian & Arab Studies at UCB.

In April 2009, the Carnegie Corporation named Makdisi a 2009 Carnegie Scholar as part of its effort to promote original scholarship regarding Muslim societies and communities, both in the United States and abroad. Makdisi was awarded the Berlin Prize and spent the spring 2018 semester as a fellow at the American Academy of Berlin.

Makdisi’s most recent book, “Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World,” was published in 2019 by the University of California Press. He is also the author of “Faith Misplaced: the Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001” (Public Affairs, 2010). His previous books include “Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East” (Cornell University Press, 2008), which was the winner of the 2008 Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association, the 2009 John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, and a co-winner of the 2009 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize given by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies.

Makdisi is also the author of “The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon” (University of California Press, 2000) and co-editor of “Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa” (Indiana University Press, 2006).

He has published widely on Ottoman and Arab history as well as on U.S.-Arab relations and U.S. missionary work in the Middle East. Among his major articles are “Anti-Americanism in the Arab World: An Interpretation of Brief History,” which appeared in the Journal of American History and “Ottoman Orientalism” and “Reclaiming the Land of the Bible: Missionaries, Secularism, and Evangelical Modernity,” both of which appeared in the American Historical Review.

Makdisi has also published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and in the Middle East Report.

Makdisi and his brothers, Saree and Karim, are co-creators of the Makdisi Street podcast. Follow them on X: @MakdisiStreet or on YouTube: @MakdisiStreet.

Afro-Indigenous Intersections, Past and Present: Through the Lens of Women

Tiya Miles, the Michael Garvey Professor of History at Harvard University, will present a keynote address to highlight the launch of The University of Tulsa’s new academic program, Historical Trauma & Transformation. The event is co-sponsored by the Tulsa Institute for Trauma, Adversity & Injustice, National Endowment for the Humanities, and John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation.
The event is FREE and open to the public, but please let us know you’re coming by registering at https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/ev/reg/cn7vmeg