Upcoming Events
The Fall 2021 evening events will be held in person in the Bucher Meetinghouse and also livestreamed.
Thursday, October 21, 2021 • 7:00 pm • Bucher Meetinghouse
BROWN BOOK AWARD LECTURE
Migration Stories of Mennonites on the Move: Russia, Canada, Germany, and Paraguay (1870-1945)
https://etown.zoom.us/j/98198359677
Paraguay’s oldest and largest Mennonite colonies are Menno Colony, founded by a group of voluntary migrants who moved from Russia to Canada in the 1870s and from Canada to Paraguay in the 1920s, and Fernheim Colony, established by a group of refugees who fled from Soviet Russia to Germany in 1929 and settled next to Menno Colony in 1930. In this lecture, John Eicher argues that the colonies remained socially and spiritually divided for the first twenty years of their existence because their migration stories were not mutually intelligible. On a broader level, the lecture suggests that all humans live inside group narratives that shape the way they understand time, space, good, evil, and reality itself.
John P. R. Eicher is an assistant professor of history at Pennsylvania State University-Altoona. He received degrees from Goshen College and the University of Iowa and visiting fellowships from the Free University of Berlin, the University of Freiburg, and the German Historical Association (Washington, D.C.). His book, Exiled Among Nations: German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age (Cambridge University Press, 2020), received the 2021 Dale W. Brown Book Award.
Tuesday, November 16, 2021 • 7:00 pm • Bucher Meetinghouse
SNOWDEN LECTURE
Seeking Religious Toleration: Anabaptist Communication Networks and Migration in the Seventeenth Century
https://etown.zoom.us/j/98208792282
Beiler explores the connections between seventeenth-century European Anabaptists in Switzerland and the Netherlands and many places in between. She explains why those connections arose, how participants communicated across cultural, linguistic and political borders, and how their relationships shaped migration opportunities and flows. The networks and processes of mobility that began in the seventeenth century extended across generations and expanded well beyond the Rhine Valley by the eighteenth century.
Rose Beiler is an associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida in Orlando whose research focuses on the German-speaking Atlantic world. She has published Immigrant and Entrepreneur: The Atlantic World of Caspar Wistar, 1650-1750 (Penn State University Press, 2008) and essays that look at the intersections of religion and migration within Europe and to the British North American colonies. She is currently working on a book titled Communication Networks and the Dynamics of Migration, 1630-1730 and a companion digital project, PRINT—People, Religion, Information Networks, and Travel.
Thursday, June 2, through Saturday, June 4, 2022
CONFERENCE
The Amish and Their Neighbors: A Multidisciplinary Conference
The international conference will highlight issues arising from interaction between Amish communities and wider society, including those in areas such as public health, government regulation, business and economic development, charitable work, land use and environmental issues, tourism, and civic involvement.
Videos of Past Events