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.
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
2021-2022
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Dr. Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens Professor of History, California State University, Northridge
"Medical Sites of Modernity in Guatemala: Women Religious and Maya Health During the Cold War"
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2017-2018
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Watch Anna Clark deliver, "Human Rights and Animal Rights: Local Control of Hospitals in the 1890s British Empire”
Anna Clark of the University of Minnesota delivered the 17th annual Casper Lecture on March 26 at Marquette University's Raynor Library. Her topic was “Human Rights and Animal Rights: Local Control of Hospitals in the 1890s British Empire.” Her lecture is part of her current book project, which is tentatively called, “Rage against the Machine: Individual Rights, Biopolitics in Britain and its Empire.”
Anna Clark is professor of history at the University of Minnesota and President of the North American Conference on British Studies. She is the author of Desire: The History of European Sexuality (2008), Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (2004), and The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (1995). She is a former editor of the American British Studies Journal.
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2016-2017
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Eckart Frahm, Yale University
Watch Eckart Frahm deliver “The Rape of Clio: History, Memory and the Cultural Heritage Crisis in the Middle East.”
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2015-2016
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Juan Cole, University of Michigan
Watch Juan Cole deliver "Iran's Intervention in Syria: Ideology or Pragmatism"
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2014-2015
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Leonard V. Smith, Oberlin College
Watch Leonard V. Smith deliver "The War After the War: Drawing Boundaries at the Paris Peace Conference"
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2013-2014
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Jon E. Lendon, University of Virginia
Watch Jon E. Lendon deliver "Ancient Greek Infantry Combat: What Can Modern Riots Tell Us?"
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2012-2013
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Rebecca J. Scott, University of Michigan
"She had always enjoyed her freedom: Re-enslavement and the Law in the Era of the Haitian Revolution."
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2011-2012
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Anthony F. Aveni, Colgate University
Watch Anthony F. Aveni deliver "Maya Apocalypse Soon?"
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2010-2011
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Raymond Mentzer, University of Iowa
Watch Raymond Mentzer deliver Standing for Mass, Seated for Sermon: An Unexpected Liturgical Consequence of the Protestant Reformation"
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2009-2010
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Judith Bennett, University of Southern California
Watch Judith Bennett deliver "Death and the Maiden in Chaucer’s England"
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2008-2009
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Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago
"North Korea: Still in the axis of evil?"
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2007-2008
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Julia Clancy-Smith, University of Arizona
"Where Elites Meet: Harem Visits, Sea-Bathing, and Sociabilities in Tunisia, c. 1830-1881"
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2006-2007
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Marianne Elliott, University of Liverpool
"Irish Protestantism and the Specter of Popery"
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2005-2006
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Jonathan Spence, Yale University
"Thinking it Through: Chinese and Catholics in the Seventeenth Century"
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2004-2005
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Susan Desan, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"The Politics of Love: Marriage, Divorce, and Gender Relations during the French Revolution"
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2003-2004
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Paul Cobb, University of Notre Dame
"There Goes the Neighborhood: The World of a Muslim Family in an Age of Crusades"
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2002-2003
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John Merriman, Yale University
"Collaboration and Resistance in Vichy France."
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