Janet Pritchard

Frederick Douglass, Emigration, Empire, and the Beginnings of Pan-Africanism, 1850–1920

Jesse Olsavsky (History & Gender Studies, Duke Kunshan University)

with a response by Janet Pritchard (Art and Art History, UConn)

Wednesday February 12, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

This talk will explore the influence Frederick Douglass had upon the development of Pan-Africanism. Though Douglass is often viewed as an American nationalist with little interest in Africa, this talk will contrarily show the ways that intellectuals in West Africa, the West Indies and the US circulated and reinterpreted Douglass’s thought in order to understand the horrendous changes in the world resulting from the overthrow of Reconstruction and the partition of Africa. Out of these transatlantic discussions, in which Douglass figured heavily, emerged the ideas and practices of Pan-Africanism, which eventually became the principal ideology of African decolonization in the twentieth century

Jesse Olsavsky is an assistant professor of history at Duke Kunshan University, Jiangsu Province, China. He is author of The Most Absolute Abolition: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835-1861.

Janet L. Pritchard is a Professor of Art, Photography/Video Area Coordinator, and Affiliated Faculty Member of the Center for Environmental Sciences & Engineering and Institute of the Environment at the University of Connecticut. Her creative research interests focus on landscape photography, using a methodology described as historical empathy. She is the author of More than Scenery: Yellowstone, an American Love Story.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Abiding River: Connecticut River Views & Stories

Janet Pritchard (Professor, Art and Art History, UConn)

with a response by Joscha Jelitzki (LCL, UConn)

Wednesday December 4, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Janet L. Pritchard will discuss her current creative research project in landscape photography, Abiding River: Connecticut River Views & Stories. As a landscape photographer, her reliance on research sets her work apart. As a UCHI Fellow this year, Pritchard is drafting her project as a book. Fellowship time allows her to keep more balls in the air as she mentally juggles thousands of photographs to decide which to include against what she needs to finish. The nature of this landscape is different than that of her previous project on Yellowstone National Park; thus, the river book’s structure must reflect that. Her presentation will trace work this fall as she immerses herself in the process.

Before photography, Janet L. Pritchard was an outdoor education instructor and spent her youth between the Northeast and Rocky Mountain West in the US. She describes herself as geographically bilingual. Her methodology, described as historical empathy, relies on archival materials to guide her depictions of complex landscapes as expressions of time and place, situating landscapes at the intersection of nature and culture. Pritchard was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. She exhibits widely, and her recent project on Yellowstone National Park, titled More than Scenery: Yellowstone, an American Love Story, was published in 2022. She is a professor and graduate advisor in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Connecticut.

Joscha Jelitzki is a scholar of German Jewish literature, and a PhD candidate in German and Judaic Studies at UConn at the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. Before joining UCHI as the Richard Brown Dissertation Fellow, he completed his research in Vienna as the 2024 Franz Werfel Fellow. He previously studied in Berlin, Frankfurt (Oder), and Jerusalem, and worked as an assistant from 2016–2019 for the critical edition of the works of Hannah Arendt. His focus is on modern German and Austrian Jewish literature and thought, theories of sexuality and secularization. He has published articles on Martin Buber and literature, the biblical figure of Job in modern Jewish literature, and on German-Jewish gangsta-rap.