Symposium—“Wesleyan in the 1830s: Historic Preservation and the Stories We Choose To Tell”
Friday, April 5, 2024 at 6:00pm
Ring Family Performing Arts Hall and various locations around campus
FREE! Registration is required. Optional lunch on Saturday: $25 general public, $15 Wesleyan students and non-Wesleyan students.
Saturday, April 6, 2024 at 9:00am
Ring Family Performing Arts Hall and various locations around campus
FREE! Registration is required. Optional lunch on Saturday: $25 general public, $15 Wesleyan students and non-Wesleyan students.
This free two-day symposium initiates a conversation regarding several domestic properties of historical significance located on the Wesleyan campus and how they can lend deeper insight into the practices of slavery, trade, and emancipation that served as the geographical and intellectual foundation for the University.
Friday’s schedule consists of opening remarks and the keynote address. On Saturday, there will be morning presentations and, after lunch, a rare opportunity to experience the history of four significant sites through guided tours. The symposium closes with a roundtable discussion on Saturday afternoon.
Symposium events are free and open to the public. Registration is required and space will be limited. Bon Appétit will also present a delicious lunch in the Daniel Family Commons at Noon on Saturday. If you would like to join the symposium participants for lunch, please choose this option on the registration form. (Lunch is $25 for the general public, and $15 for both Wesleyan students and non-Wesleyan students.)
If you are traveling from out of town, a block of rooms is available at the Inn at Middletown on Friday, April 5, 2024 for symposium attendees. Please mention you are a symposium attendee when booking. This block of rooms will be held until Monday, February 5, 2024. After that date, rooms will be subject to availability.
Visit the symposium website for full details.
Wesleyan was founded in 1831 by Methodist church leaders and prominent residents of Middletown. In addition to the handsome College Row (Brownstone Row) buildings that constitute its historic core, the campus boasts many distinctive domestic structures which the school gradually acquired as its student body and curriculum expanded.
This symposium focuses on the domestic structures built in the 1830s and interrogates the relationship between high and vernacular building styles and the oppositional ideologies underlying the Triangular and opium trades, the Colonization movement, Abolitionism, and free Black community formation which they once served.
Consisting of a Friday evening keynote lecture by Tara Dudley, Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin, introduced by Katherine Kuenzli, Professor of Art History and German, and Chair of the Art and Art History Department at Wesleyan University; papers by Joseph Siry, Professor of Art History and Kenan Professor of the Humanities, and Co-Coordinator of Urban Studies; Jesse Nasta ’07, Assistant Professor of the Practice in African American Studies; and Suzy Taraba ’77, MALS ’10; site visits to the Alsop House and Russell House led by Alain Munkittrick ’73, Partner, Munkittrick Associates, LLC, along with visits to the Center for the Americas, Beman Triangle, and Washington Street Cemetery; and a roundtable discussion moderated by Elizabeth Milroy, Professor of Art History, Emerita, and including Ahmed M. Badr '20, Director of the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Public Policy; the symposium surveys the histories of these structures as well as the ways these histories have been preserved or erased. The organizers invite consideration of how these properties and histories might be better preserved, represented, and integrated into the cityscape of Middletown and the campus of Wesleyan today.
Sponsored by Wesleyan’s Departments of Art and Art History and the Samuel C. Silipo ’85 Distinguished Visitors Fund, African American Studies Program, Department of American Studies, Office of the Dean of Arts and Humanities, the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship, and the Virgil and Juwil Topazio Fund.
Images (from left): Richard Alsop IV House, Samuel Russell House, Wilbur Fisk’s House, and the Leverett Beman Historic District.