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College of Arts and Sciences
Painting of people storming the Bastille

Annual Symposium in Comparative History

"Revolutions: Moments and Movements in Historical Perspective"
Seton Hall University
South Orange, NJ
February 6-7, 2020

What is a Revolution? Historians have used the term broadly to describe movements resulting in the toppling of regimes and establishment of new social and political orders, yet much remains unclear. Are revolutions an intrinsically modern phenomenon, or can the concept be productively applied to events in the ancient and medieval worlds? Can revolutions be clearly bounded in time? How do they begin and end? Is there a common trajectory? When and why do revolutions arise in interrelated clusters? However we choose to answer such questions, the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and recent events, from the Arab Spring to the riots in Hong Kong, remind us that revolutions, whether a cause of hope or trepidation, have lost none of their force and relevance.

About the Symposium

This symposium will consider revolutions broadly in their social, cultural, and intellectual origins and ramifications, examining the interactions of ideologies, structures, pivotal moments, and social and political movements.

A keynote address by Ervand Abrahamian, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Iranian and Middle Eastern History and Politics at Baruch College, City University of New York, will open the symposium on Thursday evening, February 6.

The symposium's panels and a roundtable discussion will be held on Friday, February 7.

The event is free and open to the public.

Please feel free to contact Sean Harvey at [email protected] with any questions. For more information about History at Seton Hall, please visit the Department of History website.

Programs from this and prior symposiums can be found here » 

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