- This event has passed.
September 18 @ 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Event Navigation
An Evening with Ashli White, Logan J. Connors, & the UM Center for the Humanities
Books & Books and the UM Center for the Humanities present…
AN EVENING WITH ASHLI WHITE
in conversation with
Logan J. Connors
discussing
Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
(Yale University Press, $65.00)
Monday, September 18th, 6:30 PM | Books & Books, Coral Gables
RSVP HERE FOR FREE
Books & Books & the University of Miami Center for the Humanities are excited to present an evening with Ashli White & Logan J. Connors for Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Yale University Press, $65.00).
This event is FREE and open to the public and books will be available for purchase the night of the event so make sure to stay after the talk for a book signing! Please RSVP only if you intend to join us.
About the Book:
How objects associated with the American, French, and Haitian revolutions drew diverse people throughout the Atlantic world into debates over revolutionary ideals
“By excavating the power of material objects and visual images to express the fervor and fear of the revolutionary era, Ashli White brings us closer to more fully embodied, more fully human, figures.”—Richard Rabinowitz, author of Objects of Love and Regret: A Brooklyn Story
“In this important, innovative book, Ashli White moves nimbly between North America, Europe, and the Caribbean to capture the richness and complexity of material culture in the Age of Revolutions.”—Michael Kwass, Johns Hopkins University
Historian Ashli White explores the circulation of material culture during the American, French, and Haitian revolutions, arguing that in the late eighteenth century, radical ideals were contested through objects as well as in texts. She considers how revolutionary things, as they moved throughout the Atlantic, brought people into contact with these transformative political movements in visceral, multiple, and provocative ways.
Focusing on a range of objects—ceramics and furniture, garments and accessories, prints, maps, and public amusements—White shows how material culture held political meaning for diverse populations. Enslaved and free, women and men, poor and elite—all turned to things as a means to realize their varied and sometimes competing visions of revolutionary change.
BUY THE BOOK HERE
About the Author:
Ashli White is associate professor of history at the University of Miami, where she specializes in the history of early North America and its ties to the Atlantic world. Her new book, Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, was published by Yale University Press in 2023, and she is also the author of Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Johns Hopkins, 2010). In 2018, she was the associate curator and co-author of the catalog for Antillean Visions, an exhibition at the Lowe Art Museum that explored over 500 years of Caribbean maps.
About the Moderator:
Logan J. Connors is Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures. He researches French literature, mainly theatre, from 1650 to 1815 as well as topics in theatre & performance studies, the history of the emotions, and comparative revolution studies. At Miami, he teaches French & Francophone Literatures from the medieval period to the present as well as graduate seminars on performance studies and professionalization. In 2022-2023, he was a visiting professor in the Department of French and Comparative Literatures at Sorbonne Université and at the Centre d’étude de la langue et des littératures françaises (CELLF) in Paris, where he was recently elected as a research associate. In 2019-2020, he was an invited research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies (Collegium) in Lyon, France. He was recently named Cooper Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences at UM.
He is the book series editor of Scènes francophones (Bucknell University Press), the only North American book series dedicated to French-language theatre. At UM, he co-convenes, with Michiko Katayama Skinner (Theatre Arts) the Interdisciplinary Research Group in Theatre & Performance Studies.