[Histmaj] Starting This Week: 2026 History Lecture Series

[HISTORY UNDERGRADUATE ADVISORS via Histmaj]

Just a quick reminder that the History Lecture Series starts this week. Hope to see you there!

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The History Lecture Series has been a beloved tradition since 1975 that brings the work of UW History faculty to the wider community. This year, the series explores incarceration, tracing its change over time from antiquity to our modern world. The series runs on Wednesdays, February 4 through 25 at 7:30 p.m. in Kane Hall 130.  For more information or to register to attend, visit the event website: https://events.uw.edu/HLS2026

Talks include:

February 4 | Mark Letteney | Roman Prisons and the Mirror of History
Ancient architects tell us that every Roman settlement should have a prison at its center, and archaeology suggests that most cities did. Purpose-built prisons populated the ancient Mediterranean and so did practices of incarceration: sentences of prison time stood beside manual labor in cities, in bakeries, and in mines. Less fortunate souls entered facilities to await execution, sometimes for years. This lecture explores the evidence for ancient incarceration in vignettes: reading letters that prisoners wrote on papyrus, investigating spaces where they were held, and analyzing depictions of captives in monuments, law-courts, and homes. Roman evidence does not model a just society, but it does offer a mirror where we can see modern practices of incarceration in a new light, asking which aspects of contemporary prisons are unique to modernity, and which reflect longer histories.

February 11 | Charity Urbanski | Taking Hostages and Prisoners: Incarceration in Medieval Europe
The phrase "medieval incarceration" usually conjures images of prisoners condemned to a damp dungeon and forgotten, but this was rarely the reality. Prisoners were often nobles who ran afoul of the king, disobedient monks, or wealthy people who could afford to pay a ransom, and the conditions in which they were held normally reflected their social status. This lecture explores the wide variety of carceral practices in medieval Europe and examines how the recovery of Roman law and the concept of the state in the twelfth century began to transform those practices.

February 18 | Moon-Ho Jung | Interrogating Loyalty: Japanese Americans and World War II
In 1942, the US government incarcerated more than 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps, based on the racist argument that they were likely "disloyal" to the United States. In the ensuing years of World War II, the US government simultaneously sought to demonstrate the "loyalty" of Japanese Americans to American democracy. By placing US wartime policies and Japanese American responses in different historical contexts, this lecture will interrogate the meanings of loyalty, democracy, and national security-during World War II and in our own time.

February 25 | Dan Berger | The Washington Prison History Project: Counter-Archives and Local Histories
Prison is more than a place of punishment. It is also an archive. Yet the official story found in sentencing reports and conduct reviews is only part of the story. Incarcerated people generate a parallel counter-archive of resistance and transformation. The Washington Prison History Project is a multimedia digital effort to document this counter-archive at a local level. Across a series of publications, programs, and protests, incarcerated people have shown prison to be a central feature in the development of Washington and the country. An examination of this archive tells a different history of our state-and its possible futures.


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NICK GRALL FSAScot (he/him)
Assistant to the Chair
308B Smith Hall | Box 353560 | Seattle, WA 98195-3560
206-543-6224 | history.washington.edu<http://history.washington.edu/>


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