Ce mardi 12 mai, vous êtes invité de nous joindre pour un Atelier Méditerranée sur Pluralité des régimes d’esclavage en Méditerranée à l’époque moderne.
Cet atelier aura lieu le mardi 12 mai 2026 en présentielle à l’Iméra et en version hybride via Zoom.
Pluralité des régimes d’esclavage en Méditerranée à l’époque moderne
Dans les sociétés méditerranéennes de l’époque moderne, des personnes esclavisées pouvaient vivre, travailler et circuler avec une relative autonomie. Loin d’être informelles, ces situations révèlent la pluralité des régimes juridiques qui encadraient la condition servile. Ce workshop, proposé par Thomas Glesener, maître de conférences au TELEMMe en congé recherche à l’Iméra en 2025-2026, explore comment ces ordres normatifs concurrents s’articulent, se heurtent et contribuent à redéfinir, au quotidien, les frontières de la dépendance.
Le programme est disponible sur le site web de l’Iméra.
Vous êtes invités au colloque Changements Climatiques et Conflits Religieux pendant le Petit Âge Glaciaire, à l’Iméra · Institut d’Etudes Avancées d’Aix Marseille Université, 2 place Leverrier, 13004 Marseille – France le lundi 27 avril et mardi 28 avril.
Ce colloque mené par Jérémie Foa (maître des conférences HDR, TELEMMe, amU) et Brian Sandberg (Senior Fellow, Iméra), vise à explorer l’histoire environnementale et le changement climatiques (c. 1550-1650).
Colleagues who are currently in Marseille or southern France are invited to attend a conference on Climate Change and Religious Conflicts during the Little Ice Age, which will be held on Monday and Tuesday (27-28 April) at the Iméra · Institut d’Etudes Avancées d’Aix Marseille Université, 2 place Leverrier, 13004 Marseille – France.
Colleagues who are interested in attending the hybrid conference sessions via Zoom should contact me at: bsandberg@niu.edu.
A federal judge in the United States has invalidated the mass firings at the Voice of America that were carried out in 2025 by Kari Lake, a Trump administration appointee.
“A federal judge on Saturday ruled that the appointment of Kari Lake, the head of Voice of America’s oversight agency, was invalid, voiding mass layoffs that she had carried out at the federally funded news group last year,” according to The New York Times.
“The decision from Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia was a major rejection of President Trump’s attempts to dismantle the storied government-funded news group, which was founded to combat Nazi propaganda.”
The ruling provides a potential pathway for salvaging the Voice of America and allowing it to resume its news and information reporting. The Voice of America has long been considered a key news media platform and a key “soft power” instrument of U.S. foreign policy.
The New York Times reports: “If upheld by higher courts, Judge Lamberth’s ruling would allow more than 1,000 journalists and support staff members at the news group to return to their jobs. Ms. Lake, who had been leading the U.S. Agency for Global Media, V.O.A.’s parent agency, said that she would appeal the decision.”
Kari Lake, Trump administration appointee as head of the Voice of America. Source: The New York Times.
“Before Mr. Trump pushed to close the agency and influence its editorial decisions, Voice of America broadcast in 49 languages and had more than 360 million weekly listeners around the world, providing news services to foreign countries with limited press freedoms, such as China, Russia and Iran. …”
The judicial ruling assesses the case in relationship to presidential appointment powers and Senate confirmation powers
Judge Lamberth “found that Ms. Lake’s appointment violated the law that determines who can serve as an acting head of an agency whose permanent leader would require Senate confirmation. The law, the Vacancies Act, requires that an acting head must be the second senior officer of an agency, be appointed by the president with the Senate’s consent or be a senior officer who had been at the agency before a vacancy arose,” according to The New York Times. “Judge Lamberth found that Ms. Lake did not satisfy those conditions.”
If this judicial ruling is upheld, the Voice of America may find a second life.
The New York Times reports on the federal judicial ruling on the Voice of America. The Atlantic Council reported on the cuts to the Voice of America in March 2025.
Constructing European Historical Narratives in the Early Modern World (Toronto: Iter, 2025) is now out in paperback!
I contributed a chapter on “Crusading Engagements: French Nobles’ Family Histories of Religious Violence,” in Constructing Historical Narratives in Early Modern France, ed. Hilary Bernstein, Fabien Montcher, and Megan Armstrong, (Toronto: Iter Press, 2025), 63-103.
I am pleased to have received my own copy of the book in paperback at the Iméra · Institut d’Etudes Avancées d’Aix Marseille Université in Marseille.
I hope that this fascinating collective volume will be adopted for upper-division and graduate courses on The Renaissance, Early Modern Europe, Mediterranean World, and World History.
Langue : ces tables-rondes se déroulent en français.
L’Histoire est fortement contestée dans les actualités par la société et les médias. Le concept des « Culture Wars » (Guerres Culturelles), en usage depuis quelques décennies aux États-Unis, s’est généralisé. Les questions de religion, culture, race, genre, esclavage, colonialisme, impérialisme, et mondialisation traversent de nombreuses discussions en lien avec les identités et les politiques identitaires partout dans le monde.
La mémoire historique est régulièrement mobilisée de multiples façons par les nations, les partis politiques, les compagnies, et les groupes sociaux. Les archives, les publications d’histoire, les expositions dans les musées historiques, et les programmes d’histoire sont ciblées par des groupes aux intérêts divers. Des médias, des plateformes numériques et des plateformes d’IA permettent la production et la diffusion de narrations historiques et de commentaires sur l’histoire avec une rapidité inattendue, niant souvent les sources historiques. Le passé est utilisé et instrumentalisé par différents groupes pour justifier leurs projets actuels et leurs programmes politiques.
Les nouvelles technologies ont accéléré la fabrication de récits mensongers, ainsi que la négation des sources historiques. Les usagers ont la capacité de détourner des récits historiques et d’affirmer leurs propres interprétations de l’histoire. Cette journée d’étude vise à interroger la place de l’Histoire dans ces nouvelles « Guerres Culturelles ».
Historians across the United States are commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr., today (19 January 2026) in troubled times.
Historians are reinterpreting the Civil Rights Movement and its significance, even as civil rights and human rights are being severely eroded in the United States. Academic freedoms are under direct assault by the Trump administration.
University professors and high school teachers across the nation are confronting politicized debates about how Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement are remembered and taught. The Trump administration is implementing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and its far-right ideological agenda for higher education.
Meanwhile, Trumpist allies in states such as Texas, Florida, Indiana, and North Carolina have brought the Culture Wars directly into college and high school classrooms. Professors at Indiana University, North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and many other research universities are facing politicized curricular restrictions and program cuts. Faculty at Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin are facing outright ideological censorship of the teaching of race, racism, minority studies, ethnic studies, area studies, women and gender studies, and other fields.
The annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day concert that is normally held at the Kennedy Center has been moved due to President Trump’s brazen rebranding of the center.
The New York Times reported last year on the coincidence of Inauguration Day falling on the same day as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
NPRreports on the Trump rebranding of the Kennedy Center.
The Washington Post reports on remembrances of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington, D.C.
ABC 7 Chicago reports on the commemorations of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in the Chicago area.
WBEZ (Chicago’s NPR station) is rebroadcasting Studs Terkel’s famous recordings of interviews with Civil Rights activists heading from Chicago to Washington, D.C., to participate in the March on Washington in 1963, where Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Historian David Ikard (Vanderbilt University) was interviewed in 2023 on NPR concerning the political battle over the creation of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Holiday, which was established in 1983.
Historian Peniel Joseph (University of Texas at Austin) commented on interpreting Martin Luther King’s message and legacy on NPR.
Time Magazine published an article on teaching Civil Rights in the climate of the current “History Wars.”
Northern Illinois University published an article on the history of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Commons on campus.
Note: this post and its links are revised from my post on MLK Day in 2025.
Jérémie Foa and I are looking forward to the next session of our research seminar on Climate Change and Religious Conflictduring the Little Ice Age.
Lundi 19 janvier 2026 :Oury Goldman (Univ. Paris I, IHMC), « Pourquoi s’intéressait-on à la nature en temps de troubles ? Savoirs et pratiques naturalistes au cours des guerres de Religion (1550-1620) »
Le séminaire Changements Climatiques et Conflits Religieux vise à développer un nouveau projet de recherche en collaboration les collègues d’Aix Marseille Université (amU) sur les changements climatiques et les conflits religieux durant le petit âge glaciaire (Little Ice Age).
Séances à venir :
Lundi 16 février 2026 : sujet et intervenant/intervenante à confirmer
Lundi 9 mars 2026 : sujet et intervenant/intervenante à confirmer
For more information or to tune into a hybrid seminar session, see the seminar website at the Iméra research institute.
I am happy to report that the hardback edition of Reframing Treaties in the Late Medieval and Early Modern West is now out and available for library adoptions.
I contributed an essay to this collective volume and enjoyed working with Isabella Lazzarini, Luciano Piffanelli, and Diego Pirillo on the project.
Abstract
Opening a fresh chapter in the burgeoning field of premodern diplomatic history, Reframing Treaties focuses on peacemaking through a wide geopolitical and constitutional range of case studies not limited to Europe, but including also the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds, and along a chronological time frame which centres on the period between the 14th and the 18th centuries but explores crossings, continuities, and afterlives up to the 21st century. The volume has two main general objectives. First, to rethink the peacemaking process and uncover the flow of negotiations that shaped late medieval and early modern political interactions. Secondly, to add an important contribution to the ongoing debate about Eurocentrism and its consequences by breaking down one of the most spectacular mechanisms (the system of the European great treaties) that helped make Western late medieval ius commune and early modern ius gentium become a purported ‘universal international order’ in the 19th century and beyond. With a multidisciplinary approach, the volume puts at the heart of the investigation not the single peace treaty, but the peacemaking process in its many forms and outcomes and demonstrates that peacemaking was a complex and multilayered phenomenon. Used as a political grammar, its binding nature transformed it into a powerful instrument to settle conflicts and regulate interactions both within and outside polities and communities. The volume is organised into four parts (Sources, Peacekeeping, Peacemaking, and Intersections), and 21 chapters and an Epilogue (chapter 22), and brings together an international team of specialists from European and American universities and from different fields.
I am looking forward to the first session of a new research seminar on Climate Change and Religious Conflicts(Changements Climatiques et Conflits Religieux)!
This is a seminar that my colleague Jérémie Foa (Aix-Marseille Université and TELEMMe) and I are co-organizing at the Iméra · Institut d’Etudes Avancées d’Aix Marseille Université.
The seminar sessions will be held in hybrid format, so please contact me via email (at bsandberg@niu.edu) if you would like a Zoom link to participate.
Seminar Sessions:
Monday 20 October 2025
Monday 3 November 2025
Monday 17 November 2025
Monday 1 December 2025
The seminar sessions will be held from 14:30 to 16:30 (Marseille time) in the Salle de réunion de la Maison Neuve de l’Iméra.
Every university and college in the United States is facing a direct, multi-pronged assault from the Trump administration.
Todd Wolfson, President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP):
“This is obviously the most intense assault on higher education by the federal government in the history of the United States,” he said. “Everyone is coming into fire.”
Todd Wolfson, President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Photo: The Guardian.
“Students and faculty heading back to US colleges and universities from summer break are returning to bruised institutions reeling from the Trump administration’s unprecedented campaign to bend higher education to its ideological will, and are bracing for more uncertainty ahead,” according to The Guardian.
“At the University of Utah, the Black student union has lost its funding and campus space – one of many student groups to face the brunt of Donald Trump’s anti-diversity measures. Indiana’s public universities have cut or merged more than 400 degree programs, about one-fifth of their academic offerings, while scores of other universities have made similar cuts as their budgets are on the line. At Harvard and Columbia, certain forms of criticism of Israel will now be punishable as antisemitism. And across the country, schools will see their international student population plummet after the administration erected a host of new barriers to students seeking to travel to the US.”
Harvard University. Photo: The Guardian.
Unfortunately, many U.S. citizens and journalists seem to be focused primarily on the Trump administration’s coercion of elite Ivy League universities like Harvard, Columbia, and Brown. Some attention is being paid to the plight of flagship public research universities like UCLA, Virginia, and Indiana.
However, President Trump’s political appointees and operatives in the so-called DOGE, Department of Education, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Program, and other federal agencies are pursuing a nation-wide assault on higher education that is already transforming universities and their research and teaching missions.
State universities, regional comprehensive universities, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges are all feeling the effects of the Trump administration’s anti-democratic policies that restrict student visas, harass international and undocumented students, restrict academic research topics, remove scientific data from federal agency websites, freeze grant funding, terminate grants and fellowships, politicize peer review processes, restrict academic publications, alter research findings and museum exhibitions, distort academic research presentation, and threaten academic freedom.
The Trump administration has also unlawfully targeted students, researchers, and professors directly by detaining students and researchers, stripping student and researcher visas, threatening to remove students’ and researchers’ permanent resident or citizenship status, firing research officers and administrators, packing university and academic boards of directors, threatening and firing museum directors, and coercing university presidents and pressuring them to resign.
Make no mistake, the Trump administration’s clear goal is to disrupt the entire American model of higher education, destroying university autonomy, research integrity, democratic access to higher education, and academic freedom in the process.
Speri, Alice. “‘Everyone is Coming into Fire’: Students Return to US Campuses Bruised and Changed by Trump’s Assault.” The Guardian (23 August 2025).
Brian Sandberg: Historical Perspectives 