R. Seldon Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, and Director, Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University
Three Cultures or One? Muslims, Jews, and Christians and the Art of Coexistence in Medieval Spain
September 29, 2005 @ 7:30 pm
Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
No moment in history has brought together the three Abrahamic communities of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism for as long or as intimately as the 700-odd years we refer to as “medieval Spain.” This largely forgotten and widely misunderstood history bears poignant witness to the vast political challenges and often stunning cultural benefits possible in such coexistence. This lecture will explore the ways in which a shared culture often managed to trump religious ideology and conflict in medieval Spain.
María Rosa Menocal earner her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania and serves currently as R. Seldon Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, where she also directs the Whitney Humanities Center. Her areas of interest include Medieval literature, literary historiography, and the cultures of Islamic Spain.
She is the author of: The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987, 2nd edition 2003); Writing in Dante's Cult of Truth from Borges to Boccaccio (Duke University Press, 1991); Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Duke University Press, 1994); and The Ornament of the World: How Muslims Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Little, Brown, 2002). She is co-editor of The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Al-Andalus (2001), and is currently completing a book for Yale University Press on the formation of the concept of Castilian culture in the 13th century, tentatively entitled Out of Arabic: Translation and the Invention of Castilian Culture.
Stephen Greenblatt
John Cogan Professor of Humanities, Harvard University
Shakespeare and the Ethics of Authority
October 20, 2005 @ 7:30 pm
Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
Stephen Greenblatt’s work helped to define the groundbreaking mode of literary and cultural analysis known as New Historicism, a school of thought which insisted that the understanding of culture must incorporate an understanding of the historical context of the time in which a work was created. His lecture will address ethics and the exercise of power, and in particular the measures taken in Shakespeare’s King Lear to protect the state from foreign invasion.
Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. His areas of specialization include Shakespeare, 16th- and 17th-century English literature, the literature of travel and exploration, and literary theory. His numerous books include Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Practicing New Historicism; and Learning to Curse: Essays in Modern Culture. He is also the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare and Associate General Editor of the forthcoming eighth edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Eric Sundquist
UCLA Foundation Professor of Literature, University of California, Los Angeles
From Afro-Zionism to Anti-Zionism: Blacks and Jews in the 1960s
November 10, 2005 @ 7:30 pm
Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
By the end of the 1960s, African Americans and American Jews were on the verge of a political and cultural divorce. Eric Sundquist will unravel this vexing period through examples such as John A. Williams’ 1969 novel Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light, which hypothesized a race war in the United States and showed that neither Afro-Zionism nor Anti-Zionism provided an adequate account of the complex domestic relationship between blacks and Jews.
Eric J. Sundquist is UCLA Foundation Professor of Literature and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author or editor of eight books, including To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993). Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in fall 2005.
Peter Brooks
Distinguished Professor of Law and Literature, University of Virginia
The Identity Paradigm
December 1, 2005 @ 7:30 pm
Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
The modern conception of identity originates in the early 19th century, with the increased bourgeois perception of a dangerous urban underclass. Identity continues to be a major concern of modern societies, and particularly the ways of finding, stipulating, and classifying the marks by which we say who people are. Peter Brooks will consider the cultural history of identity, legal issues as the status of fingerprint evidence, and the literary dramatization of problems of identification in Nathalie Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre, Rousseau’s Confessions, and Balzac’s, Le Colonel Chabert.
Peter Brooks is University Professor at the University of Virginia, where he teaches in the English Department and the Law School, and serves as Director of the Program in Law & Humanities. He was the Founding Director of Yale's Whitney Humanities Center and has served in several leadership roles, including chair of the Departments of Comparative Literature and of French and Director of the Division of the Humanities. He is the author of several books, including Realist Vision (2005), Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (2000), and his essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Yale Law Journal, and elsewhere. He chairs the Editorial Board of Yale Journal of Criticism and is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the Yale Journal of Law & Humanities.
Harold McGee
Author and Science Writer
Playing With Food: Three Centuries of Science in the Kitchen
February 23, 2006 @ 7:30 pm
1800 Engineering Hall
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
Adam Hochschild
Journalist, Author, Historian
12 Men in a Printing Shop, May 22, 1787: A Great Human Rights Movement is Born
April 28, 2006 @ 7:30 pm
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
The Center is delighted to announce the addition of Adam Hochschild to the 2004-2005 Humanities Without Boundaries lecture series. This lecture replaces the originally scheduled visit of scholar Judith Butler. Hochschild's lecture will explore an episode in his recent book, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves.
Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942. His first book, Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986. It was followed by The Mirror at Midnight (1990) and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (1994). Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels won the 1998 PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay. Hochschild's books have been translated into five languages and have won prizes from the Overseas Press Club of America, the World Affairs Council, the Eugene V. Debs Foundation, and the Society of American Travel Writers. Three of his books - including King Leopold's Ghost - have been named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review and Library Journal. King Leopold's Ghost was also awarded the 1998 California Book Awards gold medal for nonfiction. Hochschild has also written for the New Yorker, Harper's, New York Review of Books, New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones (which he co-founded), The Nation, and many other magazines and newspapers. A former commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," he teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.
