William F. Church Memorial Lecture

Akin Ogundiran (Northwestern University)
“The Oyo Empire, Merchant Capital, and Orisa Epistemology in the Atlantic World: The Other African Intellectuals During the Age of Revolution”

November 6, 2025 5:30 PM
Smith-Buonanno Hall 106

The conditions that laid the groundwork for the Age of Revolution in Europe and the Americas were also part of the lived experience in West Africa and other parts of the Atlantic world. Yet, the voices of the non-literate African men and women who debated, theorized, and acted out their critique of imperial hegemony, resisted arbitrary power, led revolts, imagined new political configurations, and contested slavery during this period are largely absent in the historiography. Is it that these so-called “natives” do not and cannot think about alternatives to slavery, merchant capitalism, and empire, or that our historical methods have been ill-equipped to “read” and understand the “natives’” thoughts and praxis? Using material and Orisa archives, Ogundiran discusses new sources and approaches for recognizing Yoruba intellectual agents in West Africa, how the grievances of these agents against the Oyo Empire shaped their ideas and actions, and the insights we gain when the thoughts and praxis of these agents are included in the intellectual history of the Age of Revolution.

About the Speaker

Akin Ogundiran is broadly interested in the archaeology and history of Africa over the past 2,500 years, with emphasis on the Yoruba world (West Africa). His earlier research efforts sought to understand the impacts of global/regional political economies on community formations and how social actors created knowledge, communities, and identities with objects and the landscape. Ogundiran’s current research intersects cultural, political economy, and environmental approaches to study the history of complex social systems at different scales—e.g., household, urbanism, and empire. His ongoing field projects are in three parts: the archaeology and history of an Early Iron Age community formation (400 BC-100 AD); the political economy and social ecology of the Oyo Empire (1570-1830); and the landscape history of the Osun-Osogbo Grove—a UNESCO World Heritage Site (ca. 1590 to the present), all in southwest Nigeria. His methodology is eclectic, ranging from archaeology, orality, and ritual archives to geosciences, landscape studies, language, performance, material life, and documentary sources. He is also interested in the cultural history of the Black Atlantic. Ogundiran directs the Material History Lab in the Department of History.

What is the William F. Church Memorial Lecture?

The Annual Church Lecture in the Department of History is given in honor of William F. Church, a Professor of History at Brown University for thirty years until his death in 1977.

William F. Church was one of America’s foremost scholars of early modern Europe and one of the most highly regarded professors at Brown. Particularly known for his work in the history of political thought, his books include Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth-Century France, Richelieu and Reason of State, and Louis XIV in Historical Thought.

The Church Lecture brings to Brown a distinguished scholar in early modern history. Colleagues and students from Brown’s History department as well as specialists in early modern studies from around the campus and New England come together for an evening lecture and reception in honor of Professor Church.

Last Year's William F. Church Memorial Lecture

November 20th, 2024 5:30 PM — Andrews House 110

Elizabeth Horodowich, Professor, New Mexico State University

"Amerasia: Early Modern Imaginative Geography, 1492–1700"

In most accounts of the post-1492 discoveries, scholars have assumed that while Europeans may have initially “confused” America with Asia, this confusion steadily and swiftly gave way to the realization that America was a New World: a fourth continent. Contrary to these expectations, this talk explores the ways in which America and Asia persistently mingled in the geographical and cultural imagination of early modern Europeans, for whom Mexico really was India, North America was an extension of China, and South America was populated by a variety of biblical and Asian sites: a way of thinking and understanding the world that persisted well into the seventeenth century. Conceptualizing an Amerasian continent brings into view a dynamic model of the world and of Europe’s place in it that was forgotten after the establishment of more recent Eurocentric colonialist narratives in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Past Lectures

2024 Elizabeth Horodowich, New Mexico State University, "Amerasia: Early Modern Imaginative Geography, 1492–1700"
2023 Dr. Jennifer Morgan, New York University, "On Race and Reinscription: Writing Enslaved Women into the Early Modern Archive"
2022 John Jeffries Martin, Professor of History, Duke University, “From the Apocalypse to the Idea of Progress in Early Modern Europe.”
2021 John McNeill, School of Foreign Service, History Department, Georgetown University, "Revisiting Mosquito Empires in the Time of COVID-19"
2021 Gillian Weiss, Professor of History, Case Western Reserve University and Professor Meredith Martin, School of Arts and Science, New York University ''Remembering Mediterranean Slavery in Early Modern France"
2020 Nick Wilding, Professor of History, Georgia State University "False Impressions: A History of Print Forgery"
2018 Nabil Matar, Professor of History and English, University of Minnesota "Mediterranean Captivity through Arab Eyes, 1517-1798"
2018 Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History, Oxford "Luther, Manhood and Pugilism"
2016 Molly Greene, Professor of Hellenic Studies, Princeton University "Ottoman Christians and the question of Ottoman Society"
2015 Elisheva Carlebach, Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society, Columbia University "Revealed Beauty and Hidden Danger: On Jewish Books of Time in Early Modern Europe”
2014 Paula Findlen, Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History; Chair, Department of History; Director of the Suppes Center for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology Director, SIMILE Program, Stanford University "Inventing Medieval Women: History, Memory, and Forgery in Early Modern Italy,”
2013 John Brewer, Eli and Edye Broad Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena "Vesuvius and Pompeii: Travel, Tourism, Science and the Imagination in the Early Nineteenth Century”
2012 Jonathan Israel, Professor of Modern History, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton "Democratic Republicanism and the Making of the French Revolution (1770- 1792)"
2011 Deborah Harkness, Professor, University of Southern California "Fiction and the Archives"
2010 On J, Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University, “Relinquishing Eternity: The Protestant Reformation and the Secularization of the West.”
2008 Keith Wrightson, Professor, Yale University
2007 Edward Muir, Northwestern University
2006 Natalie Zemon Davis, University of Toronto
2005 William Eamon, Professor, New Mexico State University
2004 John G.A. Pocock, Johns Hopkins University
2003 Loraine Daston, Director, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
2002 Professor Kevin Sharpe, University of Warwick, England
2001 Professor Dale V. Kent, University of California-Riverside
2000 Professor Stuart Schwartz, Yale University
1999 Professor Martha Howell, Columbia University
1998 Professor Mark Kishlansky, Harvard University
1997 Professor Roger Chartier, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
1996 Professor Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
1995 Professor Robert Darnton, Princeton University
1994 Professor Linda Colley, Yale University
1993 Professor Giovanni Levi, University of Venice
1992 Professor J.H.M. Salmon, Bryn Mawr College
1991 Professor David Underdown, Yale University
1990 Professor Carlo Ginzburg, Bologna and U.C.LA.
1989 Professor Caroline Walker Bynum, Columbia University
1988 Professor H.C. Erik Midelfort, University of Virginia
1987 Professor Peter Burke, Emmanuel College, Cambridge
1986 Professor Lawrence Stone, Princeton University
1985 Professor Ralph E. Giesey, University of Iowa
1984 Professor Nancy Lyman Roelker, Boston University
1983 Professor Keith M. Baker, University of Chicago
1982 Professor Olwen Hufton, University of Reading, England
1981 Professor Christopher Hill, Balliol College, Oxford
1980 Professor Simon Schama, Harvard University

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