Please join us for two Medieval Studies events at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue

Friday, October 4 (2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.)

featuring

David Perry

2 p.m., room 5409 

The Public Scholar in the Precarious University: A Workshop

Should academics go public? How does going public work? What are the risks of speaking out? What are the risks of being silent? What are the benefits? How to go about it? A widely-published journalist and historian, David Perry will speak about the perils and promises of breaking out of the Ivory Tower in this networked age, then lead the group in a workshop where they think about their own public voice.

7:30 p.m., room 4406 (English Lounge) 

The Rossell Hope Robbins Lecture, Medieval Club of New York:

Online Fanboys, Medievalism, and Global White Supremacy

Over the last few years, white supremacists bearing medieval symbols have both marched and committed mass murder around the Anglophone world and throughout Europe. These manifestations of hate, though, are just the tip of a very ugly iceberg. David Perry, journalist and medieval historian, has spent the last few years tracking the connections between medievalism and hate on sites like 8chan, 4chan, and the Neo-Nazi website Stormfront. He argues that we need to understand even the most seemingly innocuous medieval chatter in these spaces as part of a new, dangerous, phenomenon to which everyone studying the medieval past must be ready to respond.

Biography: David Perry is a journalist and medieval historian. After receiving a PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2006, David was a professor of history at Dominican University in the Chicago area. His book, Sacred Plunder: Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade (Penn State University Press, 2015) explores the construction and contests over the memorialization of the Fourth Crusade as revealed in texts about the movement of relics from East to West. Since 2013, David has published over 400 essays in numerous outlets, including CNN, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, and The Nation. His journalism covers contemporary politics, parenting, health justice, higher education, and the myriad ways in which history informs the present.

Sponsors and Co-Sponsors: The Pearl Kibre Medieval Study, Medieval Studies Certificate Program (Graduate Center), PublicsLab (Graduate Center), Humanities Center (Graduate Center), Medieval Club of New York

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