Calendar Calendar

Apr 6, 2026: Justene Hill Edwards, "The Freedman’s Bank and the (Un)Making of Reconstruction" at Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:30:00 -0400

On July 2, 1874, a bank closed its doors. The 61,144 depositors, many of whom poured their life’s savings into this financial institution, collectively lost almost $3 million. In the nineteenth century, a single bank failure did not typically garner national attention. However, this bank was no ordinary financial institution. It served a particularly vulnerable population of people: African Americans recently freed from slavery. The bank that closed was the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, also known as the Freedman’s Bank. It was a private financial institution founded by white bankers and philanthropists at the end of the Civil War to introduce formerly enslaved people to the basic tenets of American banking. When it failed in 1874, its Black depositors lost access to the hard-earned savings that would have helped their climb out of slavery. They also lost faith in the promise of banking to build wealth and economic security.

This event is part of the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts' 2025-26 Distinguished Lecture Series.

Justene Hill Edwards is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. She is a specialist in African American history and her research examines Black economic life in America. She is the author of Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank and Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina. She has won numerous fellowships and awards, most recently the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship and the Mellon New Directions Fellowship. She received her B.A. from Swarthmore College, M.A. from Florida International University, and Ph.D. from Princeton University.

View on site | Email this event

Apr 13, 2026: Aaron Landsman, "Perfect City Primer: Theater as Civic Action, Mapping as Embodied Knowledge" at Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:30:00 -0400

How is a government meeting a performance of power? What can we learn and achieve by performing it differently? How do the maps we carry in our body lead us toward new approaches to policy? What happens if we make maps together and then share our different experiences of navigating the same space?

Aaron Landsman shares examples from a body of work called Perfect City, that includes the participatory theatrical work City Council Meeting, the curriculum and toolkit for civic action that arises from that work, and the book The City We Make Together, co-authored with Mallory Catlett, and published by the University of Iowa Press.

This event is part of the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts' 2025-26 Distinguished Lecture Series.

Aaron Landsman is a multidisciplinary artist. His new and recent work includes Night Keeper, an immersive performance and vinyl LP about insomnia as urban communion, All the Time in the World, a cooperative card game that turns social media into an ensemble performance, and the ongoing body of work Perfect City, at the intersection of art, civic engagement and urban planning. Landsman is a Lecturer at Princeton's Lewis Center for the Arts.

View on site | Email this event

Apr 20, 2026: Avinoam Patt, "The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Calendar of Holocaust Memory " at Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:30:00 -0400

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19, 1943–May 16, 1943), the largest mass revolt in a major city in Nazi-occupied Europe, is the defining symbol of Jewish resistance to Nazi oppression during World War II. In the days and weeks after the uprising broke out, the news of the revolt captivated the Jewish world, and was seized upon by Jews from diverse ideological backgrounds and movements in locations around the world as the news they had been waiting and wanting to hear for almost four years. Even at the time of the Uprising, the ghetto fighters who organized the revolt were aware of the historic significance of their actions. Described by historian Israel Gutman, who himself was a participant in the revolt, as “literally a revolution in Jewish history (whose) importance was understood all too well by those who fought,” the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising quickly became the focal point of commemorative activities both during and immediately after the war, appropriated by Holocaust survivors in Europe as the basis for commemoration activities in the DP camps, by leaders in the Yishuv as confirmation of the Zionist worldview, and in the American context, as the “prism through which American Jews performed the memory of the six million” in commemorative activities in the first two decades after World War II. By 1953, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, would designate the 27th of Nisan as the date for Yom HaShoah ve-haGevruah (The Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and Heroism) to correspond with the timing of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

In this talk, Avinoam Patt will reflect on how and why April 19 became the focal point of Jewish memory of the Holocaust, and how the calendar of Holocaust memory has evolved since then.

This event is part of the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts' 2025-26 Distinguished Lecture Series and is co-sponsored by the Jewish Studies program and the Department of Religious Studies.

Avinoam Patt is the Maurice Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at New York University where he also serves as Director of the Center for the Study of Antisemitism. He is the author of multiple books on Jewish responses to the Holocaust, including Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (2009) and The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt (2021). He is also co-editor of Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust (2020) and Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust (2020). His newest books include Israel and the Holocaust (2024) and the document collection, The Surviving Remnant: Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (2024).

View on site | Email this event