The wisdom of history

‘History,’ Maya Angelou once wrote, ‘despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again’. Today, that lesson is more necessary than ever before when the profession of history is under attack, and history is being rewritten by autocrats and strongmen all around the world. Gaining a sense of the past and confronting our history are profoundly important tasks as we navigate our own times. How does history inform our sense of ourselves and our moral worlds? What is historical consciousness and how can we cultivate it? Why does history matter? And what wisdom does the past have to offer? Join us for an evening of reflection on the importance of history and history-telling with Dr Jonathan Holloway, composer and vocalist Shara Nova and host Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen.

Students use code STUDENT15 for $15 tickets.

Dr Jonathan Holloway

Speaker

Dr Jonathan Holloway is a professor of US History and the current president of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. His scholarly work specialises in post-emancipation US history with a focus on social and intellectual history. He is the author of The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans (2021) and Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940 (2013) among other publications. Jonathan is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians.

Shara Nova

Artist

Shara Nova is a composer, vocalist, and producer based in Detroit, Michigan. She has released six chamber-pop albums under the moniker My Brightest Diamond, and her newest album, Fight the Real Terror, was released in September 2024. Shara is a 3-time Grammy nominee, an Opera America Discovery Grant awardee, a United States Artists fellow, and a Knights Grant recipient. She has composed works for choirs such as the Crossing, Conspirare, and the Detroit Opera’s educational touring company, as well as for the yMusic chamber ensemble, Oregon Symphony, Aarhus Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, and the BBC Concert Orchestra. Her 2022 album The Blue Hour, co-composed with Sarah Kirkland Snider, Angélica Négron, Caroline Shaw, and Rachel Grimes was listed in NPR’s Top 10 Albums of the Year.

Shara can be found on instagram at @mybrightestdiamond

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Host

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen is professor of history at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research centres on the intellectual and cultural history of the United States from transatlantic perspectives. She is the author of American Nietzsche (2012), The Ideas that Made America (2019), and American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction (2020) and she has received numerous awards for her writing, including the Morris D Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history. Her historical essays and articles have appeared in academic journals as well as publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, The Guardian, American Scholar, Los Angeles Review of Books and Aeon, among others.