Updates
Updates
Welcome back to school with Brown 2026!
We’re looking forward to a day of presentations by Brown 2026 Visiting Faculty Fellows on October 2: Simon Newman, Marina Moskowitz, Joseph Adelman, Kate Jewell, Irenen Peirano Garrison, and our new arrivals for 2026-2027, M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska and Blake McGreedy. This day-long event will include academic talks at 9:30am at the JCB and more public-facing talks at the John Nicholas Brown Center (JNBC) at 4pm.
The Brown 2026 steering committee hopes you had a meaningful Fourth of July holiday. The beginning of this summer has been particularly busy and particularly focused on the history of 1776, as anticipated. For Commencement and Reunion Weekend, we convened three Brown 2026 panels. 1976 in 2026: A Brown 2026 Oral History convened in the morning to highlight the work of two alums and two undergraduates on the Brown 2026 Class of 1976 Oral History Project, which was also featured by Brown communications.
March has been busy for Brown 2026. The Class of 1976 oral history project has conducted fifteen interviews so far, including nine in March, and we look forward to sharing more about this project on Commencement and Reunion weekend.
As Brown 2026 events accelerate in February 2026, we want to use our monthly update as an opportunity to highlight programming of wide interest to the campus community. As always, we are sponsoring events that showcase the breadth of the American experience, as well as those that ask challenging questions about popular memory of the Revolution and that consider the role of the research university in a democratic society.
Brown 2026 programming for 2026 is underway. We welcomed the new year with a new round of Brown 2026 Reads, featuring faculty-author-led book discussions on Integrated by Noliwe Rooks, Skinfolk by Matthew Pratt Guterl, Why Nothing Works by Marc Dunkelman, and The Self in the West and East Asia by Jin Li.
Winding down a semester full of events, Brown 2026 is looking to the spring semester. For winter 2026, Brown 2026 Reads features 4 faculty-author led discussions at the John Carter Brown Library: Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress – and How to Bring It Back by Marc Dunkelman; Skinfolk: A Memoir by Matthew Pratt Guterl; The Self in the West and East Asia: Being or Becoming by Jin Li; Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children by Noliwe Rooks.
Following the completion of the fall 2025 Brown 2026 Reads in early October, this month has been packed with events and programming. Former Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan spoke about archives at the John Carter Brown Library. Brown Votes undergraduate fellows spearheaded an event called Voices of Change: The Role of Students in Modern Democracy, which explored the history of student activism in the United States.
As the fall semester is underway, Brown 2026 moves forward by engaging students, the campus, and the larger Brown community. September events included an open house and the Fictions of Revolutions conference at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study (JNBC).
Brown 2026 has been busy this summer. Through UTRA, students have been working on Brown 2026-related projects. Michael Yuze ’26 is researching Brown University during the bicentennial. Aiden Flores ’27 is working in the Brown University Archives reading correspondence of President Keeney, who chaired the national committee culminating in the creation of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Brown 2026 is accelerating into a year of robust programs and opportunities for Brown University community members in 2025-2026. In addition to larger events engaging the campus and beyond, we have a set of curricular and other programs for alumni and students. For example, the next installment of Brown 2026 Reads picks back up in the fall with faculty-author-led discussions in September and October.
Brown 2026 is a university-wide initiative exploring the relationship between the university and democracy while engaging the fullest histories of the American Revolution and its legacies.