Spring 2026 Events
April 2026
5:30pm – 7:30pm
909 Renaissance Park
Portrait of a Port: A Maritime History of Boston with Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus Dr. William M. Fowler
Register and read more about Dr. Fowler and this conversation here!
10am – 12pm
206 Egan Research Center
12:15pm – 1:30pm
323 Knowles, Northeastern University School of Law
Northeastern’s Center for Global Law and Justice will host faculty, including Professor of History Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, to discuss current events in the Middle East, US, and beyond.
For registration and more info, see: https://law.northeastern.edu/event/law-politics-and-war-in-the-middle-east/
10am – 12:pm
909 Renaissance Park
The Free and Open Indo-Pacific: Minilateralism and Security Cooperation in Northeast Asia with Matthew Fleming, NU PhD Student in Political Science & Non-Resident James A. Kelly Korea Fellow, Pacific Forum
Register and read more about this event here!
12pm – 2pm
909 Renaissance Park
Keeping the USS Constitution Afloat: Maritime Conversation and Public History with Margherita M. Desy, Historian for the USS Constitution at Naval History & Heritage Command Detachment Boston
Register and read more about this event here!
10am – 12pm
440 Egan Research Center
March 2026
Register for our conference here! Please register whether you plan to attend one panel or the full day.
The Global and the Local: Power, Accommodation, and Resistance
Fri, Mar 13, 2026; 8 a.m. – 6 p.m. EDT
Cabral Center at the O’Bryant African American Institute, 40 Leon Street Boston, MA 02115 (Map to O’Bryant Institute and Cabral Center here)
The Northeastern History Graduate Student Association invites submissions for a conference exploring the connection between local and the global. Successful submissions will engage with the granular—individual lives, singular events, particular places, or overlooked sources—while moving outward to address larger structures and processes of power, accommodation, and resistance, broadly defined. Further macro-level processes that we are interested in include empire, migration, capitalism, the environment, gender, law, and culture.
The conference’s keynote speaker will be Dr. Elisabeth Leake, an award-winning historian and the Lee E. Dirks Professor in Diplomatic History at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her latest book, The Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan (2022), was the winner of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ Robert H. Ferrell Prize. It uses local, regional, and international histories to tell an innovative, global story of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, 1979-89.
Examples that engage the conference’s central focus on power, accommodation, and resistance include (but are not limited to):
- Migration stories that challenge national or transnational frameworks
- Microhistories of political resistance, collaboration, or cultural exchange
- Studies of archives, objects, and material traces that unsettle the binary between the local and the global
- Legal disputes and cases that open windows into broader global structures
- Environmental microhistories with a global perspective
- Transformations in the notion of gender in response to globalized media and cultural flows
- Microhistories of borderlands, contact zones, and peripheries that showcase cross-cultural encounters and asymmetrical power relations
- Networks of individuals, ideas, and/or movements that shed light on the global nature of local histories.
We welcome submissions from historians and scholars in related disciplines—including anthropology, sociology, literary studies, geography, and others—who engage with microhistorical approaches to address global questions. We also welcome research from public history and the digital humanities, as well as other interdisciplinary perspectives and experimental methods.
Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and a brief bio (100–150 words) by January 5th, 2026 to this Google Form. Accepted participants will be notified by January 26th, 2026, and will be required to submit full papers by February 23rd, 2026. The conference will take place at Northeastern University’s Boston campus on March 13, 2026. For further questions please contact the Northeastern HGSA at [email protected].
11:00pm – 1:00pm
433 Curry Student Center
4:45pm – 6:15pm
909 Renaissance Park
Cynthia Hooper, Associate Professor of History, College of the Holy Cross
Professor Cynthia Hooper has served as a Fellow at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center and as a Fellow of the Davis Center at Harvard. She serves as a Center Associate at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian Studies. Her expertise includes Russian and Soviet history; comparative dictatorship; culture and politics in 20th century Europe. Her publications have dealt with Party Corruption in the later Stalinist years; Stalinist Terror and Family Politics in the 1930; and Systemic Terror and Coercion in the Soviet Union from Stalin’s rise to Khrushchev’s fall (1964).
The Burds Memorial Series is sponsored by the Department of History
February 2026
4:45pm – 6:15pm
909 Renaissance Park
“Seven Myths of the Russian Revolution” with speaker Leonid Trofimov, Senior Lecturer in History Bentley University.
Leonid Trofimov’s research interests focus on Russia’s relations with the world. He published an article examining the activities of Soviet reporters at the Nuremberg Trial of the Nazi leadership as well as a co-edited collection of documents on Russia in war and revolution. Most recently, he co-authored a book on the global impact of the Russian revolution and a book that examines the myths that shaped the Russian revolution and its popular perceptions.
January 2026
4:45pm – 6:15pm
909 Renaissance Park
“Imperial Russia and the Globalization of the Metric System” with speaker Geoffrey Durham, Assistant Professor of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Geoffrey Durham joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty after receiving his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2023. He is presently a visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, where he is completing a draft of his manuscript, tentatively titled, Imperial Russia and the Global Standardization of Weights, Measures, and Money. He has also begun work on a second book-length project about the history of platinum.