The annual Casper was inaugurated by the History Department in 1993 to honor Rev. Henry W. Casper, S. J., a long-time member of the history departments at Creighton University in Omaha and at Marquette University (he retired as Professor Emeritus from Marquette in 1974). He was an expert in nineteenth century European History and in American church history; his most important work was a three-volume history of the Catholic Church in Nebraska. The Casper Lecture, as well as several programs for graduate students in history, is funded by an endowment from Dr. and Mrs. Wayne L. Ryan of Omaha. Dr. Ryan was a student of Father Casper’s at Creighton.

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19th Annual Rev. Henry W. Casper, S.J., Lecture

March 6, 2023 at 4:30 p.m. | Beaumier Suite, Raynor Memorial Libraries

Register to Attend in Person or Join Virtually

"Forgetting a Global Pandemic: Lessons from the Spanish Flu"

Dr. Guy Beiner
Craig and Maureen Sullivan Millennium Chair
Professor of History and Director of Irish Studies
Boston College

Professor Guy Beiner is the Sullivan Chair in Irish Studies at Boston College and a distinguished historian of nineteenth-century Ireland and history and memory. Beiner’s work crosses a lot of disciplinary boundaries: He began researching the interconnections between folklore, history, and memory in Ireland during the 1990s. Until recently, he was based at Ben Gurion University (in Israel), and he has been a frequent visiting scholar in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States. A superb lecturer and a generational scholar, Beiner is the only two-time recipient of the Wayland D. Hand Prize from the American Folklore Society for the best book combining historical and folkloristic materials and methodologies (for his works Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory and Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and 

Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster). Pierre Nora, the French scholar whose work on sites of memory is foundational to the field of history and memory, wrote about Forgetful Remembrance that “Guy Beiner has contributed to opening a new page in the history of memory, that of forgetting. He writes about the particular case of Ireland but the perspectives which he opens concern all historians of memory." 

In the late 2010s, he turned his attention to the Spanish Flu pandemic, a topic which proved sadly prescient given what the world has faced since 2020. Last year, his edited collection Pandemic Re-Awakenings: the Forgotten and Unforgotten 'Spanish' Flu of 1918-1919 brought together work from 19 scholars from four continents. He will be lecturing here on material related to that work.

 

Free and open to the public
Sponsored by the Marquette University Department of History
For more information, call 414.288.7217.

 

 

Previous Casper Lectures