Reed College

A talk by Glynnis Fawkes.

How does a cartoonist go about adapting a work of history, specifically Eric H. Cline’s 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed? In this talk Fawkes will describe the process of interpreting Cline’s text in comics, an exercise during which she repeatedly asked herself how she might tell this story visually. Through page compositions and dramatizations in which historical figures (such as Ramses III) speak, she imagined characters for whom we have no record offering commentary and opinions. To guide the narrative, she introduced two new young characters, Pel (of the Sea Peoples) and Shesha, (an Egyptian scribe) who ask the central question of the book: Why after three prosperous centuries did the civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age suddenly come to an end?

Glynnis Fawkes is the co-author with Eric H Cline and illustrator of 1177 BC: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton University Press). She is also the author-illustrator of Charlotte Brontë before Jane Eyre (Little, Brown)and Persephone’s Garden (Secret Acres), among other books, and her comics have appeared on the website of The New Yorker. She has worked as an archaeological illustrator around the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean and teaches at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont.

Sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America and Reed's department of Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies. Free and open to the public.

A lecture by David Kerry '20.
"The Transimperial Indian New Deal, 1923-1953" situates the “Indian New Deal”—a transformative set of U.S. federal Indian policies that halted the large-scale allotment of tribal lands, created a mechanism for federal recognition of tribal governments, and introduced new socio-economic programs on tribal reservations—as a productive site of transimperial interaction with the broader imperial world of the mid-twentieth century. It contends that during the New Deal period, members of the Indian Office thought of themselves as imperial officials engaged in the administration of colonized populations and consequently looked to, communicated with, and emulated other imperial functionaries around the globe. Writing against scholarship that attributes the Indian New Deal’s profound policy changes to domestic reform movements, "The Transimperial Indian New Deal" instead locates their genesis in three distinct imperial undertakings: the Spanish “Law of the Indies” and its application to Pueblo forms of self-government in colonial New Mexico; British “indirect administration” in Tanganyika and Fiji between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries; and the indigenista policies of the post-Revolutionary Mexican state in the 1920s and 30s. By tracing the networks of people, practices, and ideas that linked the Indian Office with each of these endeavors this project demonstrates how Indian Office officials actively operated within and ultimately came to shape global regimes of imperial administration.
David Kerry '20 is a doctoral candidate in history at Yale University specializing in global imperial history with a focus on Native North America and U.S. Empire. His scholarship positions U.S. federal Indian policy as a generative site for American engagement with other imperial powers by exploring the intellectual, social, and material connections linking the ongoing colonization of Native Americans with contemporaneous projects of global colonial administration. He is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Reed history department.
Free and open to the public.