2025 Sloan Lecture Series

We offer lectures each month on a variety of topics. See below for more details about each event. More lectures will be added as they are confirmed. Support for our 2025 Lecture Series is provided by the Winifred & De Villo Sloan, Jr., Charitable Fund.

Our theme for 2025 is (R)Evolutions. Throughout its history, the Erie Canal has been an agent of change and transformation, both gradual and abrupt. It was revolutionary in its own right while also being shaped by and influencing other transformative events. It has also been a continually evolving waterway, adapting throughout its history to meet the needs and demands of the communities it flowed through and connected. These changes reverberate up to the present with both positive and negative impacts that we continue to grapple with historically. As we commemorate the bicentennial of the Erie Canal’s completion in 2025, the Erie Canal Museum aims to examine these diverse transformative impacts on peoples and places in the past, present, and future in a variety of ways, which we look forward to sharing with you throughout the year.


Wednesday, January 15 @ 7:00 PMHow the Erie Canal Created Queer Life in Brooklyn

At the beginning of the 19th century, the Erie Canal transformed life across America in exciting and unforeseeable ways, and we are still living with the reverberations of those developments. Come hear historian Hugh Ryan (author of When Brooklyn Was Queer) discuss how 339 miles of canal turned Brooklyn from a collection of sleepy hamlets out on Long Island into an urban mecca for LGBTQ+ life.

Thursday, February 20 @ 12:00 PM – Illuminating the Lost Voices of Lorenzo

Friday, March 21 @ 12:00 PM – Along These Waters: Lost Voices of the Erie Canal
Thursday, April 3 @ 1:00 PM – Trolley Boats, Electric Mules, and Battery-Electric Ships

Thursday, May 22 @ 12:00 PM – Common Labor: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals

Saturday, June 2 @ 3:00 PM – Lafayette and the Erie Canal

Wednesday, July 30 @ 6:00 PM – Erieville Reservoir Dam and Tuscarora Lake: Then and Now

Thursday, August 28 @ 12:00 PM – Determined Not to Enter the Ditch Again: Labor Struggles of the Erie Canal