Mlle Bonafon and the Private Life of Louis XV: What the Butler Saw and What the Public Read in Eighteenth-Century France
September 18, 2003
Music Hall
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
Robert Darnton is Professor of History at Princeton University. He is a prominent historian of pre-modern Europe, and a specialist in the history of books and publishing. His lecture will explore the tale of Mademoiselle Bonafon, a maid and writer in 18th century France whose wildly popular fairytale and romance novels contained thinly veiled stories about the private lives of royalty and the aristocracy. Darnton's books include George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the 18th Century (W.W. Norton, 2003), The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (Harper Collins, 1995), and The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Random House, 1985).
Michael Fried
Professor of Humanities and Director of the Humanities Center, John Hopkins University
Caravaggio: The Invention of Absorption
October 16, 2003
Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
Michael Fried is Boone Professor of Humanities and Director of The Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. One of the most influential art historians of our time, Fried's critical writing in the 1960s helped to define the terms of conceptualism, minimalism and other "isms" that continue to be touchstones for the art of our time. Over the past 30 years, Fried has exhaustively explored the nature of post-enlightenment painting, focusing on a characteristic he has called "absorption," a trait shared by both the painted subject and the viewer. Fried's early writings are collected in Art and Objecthood (University of Chicago Press, 1998) and his numerous books and collections of poetry include Courbet's Realism (University of Chicago Press, 1990) and Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Peter Gay
Professor of History Emeritus, Yale University and Former Director, The Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library
The Liberal Temper: A Study in Political Psychoanalysis
November 17, 2003
Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
Peter Gay is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and until recently Director of The Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Cultural historian Peter Gay's life story is as complex and fascinating as the subjects he examines in his work. Born in Germany's Weimar era, he emigrated to the west via Cuba just before the Nazi invasion of Poland. Gay taught at Columbia and Yale, and has published 25 books and countless articles. His books include the monumental five-volume work The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (W.W. Norton, 1984-1998), Freud: A Life for Our Time (W.W. Norton, 1988) and the recent Savage Reprisals: Bleak House, Madam Bovary, Buddenbrooks (W.W. Norton, 2002).
Colin McGinn
Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University
The Power of Cinema: Descartes, Dreams, and Hollywood
February 19, 2004
Music Hall
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
Colin McGinn is among our most lively, engaging, and accessible philosophical minds, and his work welcomes both academic and non-specialist readers. McGinn's central idea-that the root of consciousness lies in matter-lends physicality and mystery to the exploration of perception and self-awareness. McGinn's work includes The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through 20th Century Philosophy (Harper Collins, 2002), Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (Basic Books, 1999), as well as numerous book reviews, essays and also includes a contribution to a collection of essays on The Matrix website.
Susan Douglas
Professor of Communication Studies, University of Michigan
The Turn Within: Self-Absorption, the Media, and the Fate of America
March 25, 2004
Red Gym
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
Media theorist/critic, and author of Where the Girls Are: Growing up Female with the Mass Media (Times Books, 1994), Susan Douglas is a leading voice in the ongoing analysis of the effects of mass media on our lives. Her lecture will look at the role of the "traditional" humanities disciplines in the relatively new area of media studies.
Caroline Walker Bynum
Institute for Advanced Study
The Blood of Wilsnack and the Fifteenth Century
April 22, 2004
Red Gym
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
A historian of Christianity and the Medieval era, Carolyn Walker Bynum is one of the world's most original and prolific historians. She is the author of numerous articles and 11 books, including Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1988), Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (Zone Books, 1990); The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (Columbia University Press, 1995), and Metamorphosis and Identity (Zone Books, 2001).
