- Kären Wigen, Stanford University, 2017
- Gregg Mitman, University of Wisconsin at Madison, 2016- webcast
- Jacob Dlamini, Princeton University, 2015- webcast
- Laurent Dubois, Duke University, 2014- webcast
- Jeremy Suri, University of Texas at Austin, 2013- webcast
- Amanda Vickery, University of London, 2013
- Naomi Oreskes, University of California, San Diego, 2011
- Gary Y. Okihiro, Columbia University, 2010
- Lou Perez, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2009
- Peter Duus, Stanford, 2009 (lecture for 2008-2009 academic year)
- Adam Hochschild, 2007 (A webcast of the 2007 Alfred E. Golz Lecture is available on iTunes)
- Peter Hayes '68, Northwestern University, 2006 (A webcast of the 2006 Alfred E. Golz Lecture is available through Hawthorne-Longfellow Library's Special Collections Archive)
- Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University, 2005
- Joseph C. Miller, University of Virginia, 2004
- Friedrich Katz, University of Chicago, 2003
- Barbara Metcalf, University of California, Davis 2002
- Weiming Tu , Harvard University, 2001
- Martin Schaffner, University of Basel, 2000
- Ira Berlin, University of Maryland, 1999
- Michael Blakey, Howard University, spring 1998
- Jonathan Spence, Yale University, fall 1998
- William B. Taylor, University of California, Berkeley, 1997
- David Keightley, University of California, Berkeley, 1996
- Hans Guggisberg, University of Basel, 1995
- Abiola Irele, Harvard University, 1994
- James McPherson, Princeton University 1993
- Nancy Farriss, University of Pennsylvania 1992
- Pierre Sauvage, Los Angeles, 1991
- Frederic Wakeman, University of California, Berkeley, fall 1990
- Natalie Zemon Davis, Princeton University, spring 1990
- David Brion Davis, Yale University, 1989
2019: Janaki Nair
Alfred E. Golz Lecture Fund was established by Ronald A. Golz '56 in 1970 in memory of his father. This fund is used to support a lecture by an eminent historian or humanitarian to be scheduled close to the November 21 birthday of Alfred E. Golz.
The Golz Lecture for the 2019-2020 academic year was delivered by Janaki Nair.
Inheritance of Loss: Women’s Wills and Female Personhood
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
7:30 PM
Location: Kresge, VAC
A rich legal archive, generated by a single case in the princely state of Mysore in Southern India, invites the question, how do historians interpret the surprising and pervasive presence of women in the historical archive?
Between 1845 and 1916, the banker Damodar Dass of Srirangapatnam, Mysore loaned a large sum of money to the Maharaja of Mysore. For the next seven decades, the multiple claims of Damodar Dass’ heirs to this inheritance engaged the colonial state and Mysore government.
Occupying the foreground were the legal dilemmas surrounding the entitlement of four female heirs in the wealthy merchant family. These claims also revealed the shaping of a new moral order which called into question the capability of four females at a crucial time when the state of Mysore was increasingly turning into a modern bureaucratic state.
Yet this archive itself contains the potential of disturbing the singular trajectory of this state-centered discourse. We may recover a third narrative involving the ‘small voices of history’. What hopes did this era of profound transformation hold out for women of the non-domestic sphere? What, moreover, can all these women be heard to say about the truth of their times?