Upcoming Events
How Peter the Great Sank in the Baltic Sea: Commemorating the First Seafaring Russian Emperor in Riga, Latvia (and Elsewhere) Kevin M.F. Platt (Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania) Moderated by Brian Horowitz (Professor & Chair, Department of Jewish Studies, Tulane) as moderator
Monday, April 6, 2026, 12:00-1:00 pm
CELT Room #306 in Howard-Tilton Memorial Library
In 1915, for fear of encroaching German armies, a monument to Peter the Great created by Berlin sculptor Gustav Shmidt-Cassel was removed from its pedestal in central Riga, present-day Latvia’s capital city, which the emperor had conquered in his quest for seaports in 1710. The monument was dispatched to Saint Petersburg for safekeeping, yet never arrived: the ship carrying it, the Serbino, was attacked and sunk by a German destroyer. And so the German equestrian monument to the Baltic conquests of Russia’s first seafaring emperor was itself lost at sea in the course of the war with Germany that brought both Latvian independence and the dissolution of the empire Peter built. If this were a dream, Freud would have described it as overdetermined. This lecture will spin out from this moment into consideration of historical myths and realities relating to Peter the Great and the water, the ports of the Russian Empire, the distinctions between sea-based and land-based empires, and those between capitalist and state socialist ones. We will touch on other monuments to Peter along the way, including Saint-Petersburg’s Bronze Horseman, the subject of Alexander Pushkin’s famous poem of that name, landlocked Moscow’s grotesque post-Soviet monument to Peter (a repurposedmonument to Columbus), and the more recent fate of the Riga monument, that was recovered by Estonian divers in the 1930s, more recently reassembled, yet never reinstalled on any official pedestal in independent Riga.
Past Events
Global Port Cities, Transnational Religious Networks, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Campaign for Justice Heather D. Curtis (Director for the Center for Humanities at Tufts)Nghana Lewis (Associate Chair & Professor of English & Africana Studies)
Monday, March 30, 2026, 12:00-1:00 pm
CELT Room #306 in Howard-Tilton Memorial Library
Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931), the pioneering African American journalist and activist for racial and gender justice, will be the focus of a presentation and conversation between Heather Curtis, Director of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University, and Nghana Lewis, Professor of English and Africana Studies at Tulane University. Their discussion will examine Wells-Barnett’s engagement with emerging transnational religious reform networks shaped by the circulation of people and ideas through major port cities. Curtis and Lewis will also reflect on the continuing relevance of Wells-Barnett’s work for contemporary debates about justice, rights, and equality within and beyond the United States.
A Sea of Ink: print cultures of early modern Manila Stephanie Porras, Professor, Art History Rethinking Scope and Significance: Lessons from Singapore and Malaysia Cheryl Naruse, Professor, Associate Professor, English
Monday, March 16, 2026, 12:00-1:00 pm
CELT Room #306 in Howard-Tilton Memorial Library
These two talks are in conversation with one another in their shared interrogation of how “the global” is constructed and contested in Southeast Asia — one through the lens of early modern print culture in Manila, the other through Cold War-era Singapore and Malaysia. Both challenge dominant narratives of globalization by centering overlooked local actors, objects, and moments as sites of negotiation, resistance, and meaning-making.
Shannon L. Dawdy Political Ecology of the Gulf of Mexico
Monday, March 2, 2026, 12:00-1:00pm
CELT Room #306 in Howard-Tilton Memorial Library
Shannon Lee Dawdy will discuss political ecology as a framework to think about material flows within the Gulf of Mexico over the longue durée, particularly as it relates to trade, fishing, and oil extraction. She argues that human history can be more accurately mapped through connective waters than through porous national borders. The Gulf’s key role in the Earth system and its rich ecology have overridden imperial designs time and time again. The Gulf is not only a force of nature but a force of history.
Tulane Global Humanities Center Inaugural Symposium Global Port Cities
Thursday, January 22 - Friday, January 23, 2026
LBC Room 203 (Stibbs)
From January 22-23, 2026, the Tulane Global Humanities Center hosted its inaugural symposium on the biennial theme, Global Port Cities. Find information about the symposium and see recordings of the panels.
Dr. Lama Elsharif, Postdoctoral Fellow at Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University
Monday, November 10, 12 pm
CELT Room #306 in Howard-Tilton Memorial Library
Dr. Lama Elsharif will present a talk that examines how the port city of Tunis under Ḥammūda Pasha, bey of Tunis (1782-1814) functioned as a center of governance. Rather than examining North Africa’s port cities through fragmented lenses that cast them either as quarantine stations, corsairing bases, commercial gateways, or cosmopolitan crossroads, this talk brings these dimensions into a single frame to show how they collectively shaped political authority in Tunis. A key port city in the early modern Mediterranean, Tunis was both a harbor of power and a point of vulnerability, strategic for diplomacy and trade yet exposed to wars, epidemics, and scarcity. Dr. Elsharif argues that the convergence of these pressures transformed Tunis into a laboratory of governance, where coastal life and imperial politics intersected and where rulers defined and tested power at the water’s edge.
Dr. Macabe Keliher, Professor of History at Southern Methodist University. “Constructing the Laissez-Faire Narrative of Industrialization: Hong Kong at the 1970 World Expo”
Monday, October 27, 12 pm
Stibbs Room in LBC
Macabe Keliher, Professor at Southern Methodist University, will present, “Hong Kong at the 1970 World Expo and the Myth of Free Market Industrialization.” Dr. Keliher explores how the Hong Kong pavilion at the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka presented a narrative of free trade and laissez-faire economics that came to impact all subsequent interpretations of economic development right up to the present day. He argues that this narrative was a particular interpretation of Hong Kong’s development and contrary to existing understandings, it was not natural but rather actively constructed in response to an unstable international context that threatened economic development.
Dr. Erin Graff Zivin, Director of the University of Southern California Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab “Deconstruction and Improvisation: Experimental Humanities Today”
Monday, October 20, 12 pm
Location: Kendall Cram Hall, LBC
Dr. Ana M. Ochoa Gautier, Tulane Professor of Ethnomusicology and Hannah Chalew, Visual Artist
Monday, October 13, 12 pm
CELT Room #306 in Howard-Tilton Memorial Library
Dr. Ana M. Ochoa Gautier, Tulane professor and ethnomusicologist, & Hannah Chalew, visual artist, will present a short talk on their research and then have a conversation around the shared themes on extraction, aurality, arts, and port cities found in their work.
An Ocean of Air-Rights: Speculative Reconstruction in Contemporary Mumbai with Vyjayanthi V. Rao
September 22, 12 pm
Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Room 306
This talk contrasts and explores two exemplary moments in the growth and urban development of the colonial port city of Bombay from the 19th century to its present avatar as Mumbai, a center of global speculative capital. Connecting the colonial opium trade to the city’s morphology and physiognomy, we explore the contemporary effort to redevelop Mumbai through the planning instrument of air rights and the forms of collective urban life that might be produced in its wake.
“Tulane Global Humanities Center: The Launch”
September 8–12 pm
Stibbs Room in Lavin-Bernick Center
Panelists: Chris Dunn, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev, Maryam Athari, Tori Bush
Moderator: Brian Edwards
This opening panel discussion of the Tulane Global Humanities Center explores the center's biennial theme of Global Port Cities.