Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng
Torture, Slavery and Utopia: Ancient Greeks in the 21st Cent
Dave Eggers is the author of six previous books, including his most recent, Zeitoun, a nonfiction account a Syrian-American immigrant and his extraordinary experience during Hurricane Katrina and What Is the What, a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award. That book, about Valentino Achak Deng, a survivor of the civil war in southern Sudan, gave birth to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, run by Mr. Deng and dedicated to building secondary schools in southern Sudan. Eggers is the founder and editor of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco that produces a quarterly journal, a monthly magazine (The Believer), and Wholphin, a quarterly DVD of short films and documentaries. In 2002, with Nínive Calegari he co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for youth in the Mission District of San Francisco. Local communities have since opened sister 826 centers in Chicago, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Ann Arbor, Seattle, and Boston. In 2004, Eggers taught at the University of California–Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and there, with Dr. Lola Vollen, he co-founded Voice of Witness, a series of books using oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. In addition, The Wild Things novel based loosely on the storybook by Maurice Sendak and the screenplay co-written with Spike Jonze, will be available in bookstores. A native of Chicago, Eggers graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in journalism. He now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two children.
Valentino Achak Deng was born in southern Sudan, in the village of Marial Bai. He fled Sudan in the late 1980’s during civil war, when his village was destroyed by murahaleen—the same type of militia that currently terrorize Darfur. Deng grew up in Ethiopian and Kenyan refugee camps, where he worked for the UNHCR as a social advocate and reproductive health educator. In 2001 he resettled to Atlanta. Deng has toured the US and Europe speaking about his life in Sudan, his experience as a refugee, and his collaboration with author Dave Eggers on What Is the What, the novelized version of Deng’s life story. As a leader in the Sudanese diaspora, Deng advocates for the universal right to education and the freedom of his people in Sudan. In 2006, Deng and Eggers established the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation to help rebuild Sudanese communities by increasing access to educational opportunities. The Foundation has constructed the very first high school in Valentino’s region of Southern Sudan, which opened in May 2009, and plans for a library, teacher-training college, and community center are currently underway. www.valentinoachakdeng.org
In this talk, Evelyn Fox Keller focuses on the idea that the causes of trait development can be parsed into two categories: nature and nurture. She argues that this fundamentally incoherent notion, which still persists in both the popular and technical imagination, was the innovation of Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911). It was spurred in part by his particulate theories of inheritance and has been sustained, again in part, by chronic slippages in the language of genetics.
Evelyn Fox Keller’s research focuses on the history and philosophy of modern biology and on gender and science. She is the author of several books, including A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (1983), Reflections on Gender and Science (1985), The Century of the Gene (2000), and Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors and Machines (2002). Her most recent book, The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture, is now in press.
Miss the lecture? View an edited version of Michael Pollan's speech here
Real food--the kind of food your great-grandmother would recognize as food—is being undermined by science on one side and the food industry on the other, both of whom want us focus on nutrients, good and bad, rather than actual plants, animals and fungi. The rise of “nutritionism” has vastly complicated the lives of American eaters without doing anything for our health, except possibly to make it worse. Nutritionism arose to deal with a genuine problem--the fact that the modern American diet is responsible for an epidemic of chronic diseases, from obesity and type II diabetes to heart disease and many cancers--but it has obscured the real roots of that problem and stood in the way of a solution. That solution involves putting the focus back on foods and food chains, for it turns out our personal health cannot be divorced from the health of the soil, plants, and animals that make up the food chains in which we take part. In this talk, Pollan explores what the industrialization of food and agriculture has meant for our health and happiness as eaters, and looks at the growing national movement to renovate the food system.
The Center for the Humanities in partnership with the Wisconsin Alumni ResearchFoundation; the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies; the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE); the Wisconsin Initiative for Science Literacy; the Bradshaw-Knight Foundation; UW-Madison Libraries; the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences; the Distinguished Lecture Series; UW-Madison Athletics; and the Research, Education, Action and Policy on Food Group (REAP) is pleased to announce a public lecture by Michael Pollan. This event is free and open to the public.
Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food has been chosen as the first book in the Go Big Read common book program.
Read one of Pollan's recent articles about the future of food in America: New York Times Magazine: The Food Issue: An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief
The unnatural comes in several forms: monsters that violate the order of natural species; catastrophes that capsize the order of ecological balance; marvels or miracles that break with the order of what happens always or most of the time. It is a striking fact that these versions of the unnatural also provoke distinctive emotional responses: horror, terror, and wonder, respectively. These are the emotions (or better, passions, in the original sense of the term as an extreme state that we suffer rather than merely feel) that register a breach of order -- and blur the boundary between the natural and the moral.
Foucault identified the beginning of the modern age in his history of Western notions of subjectivity with "the Cartesian moment," by which he meant the prioritizing of knowledge over "care of the self" or spirituality. What are the procedures of Cartesian self-knowledge? In what sense does Descartes initiate a type of introspection characteristic of what we have come to understand as self-analysis?
Leo Bersani will participate in a brown bag, "Thinking Intimacies: A Faculty Roundtable with Leo Bersani" on Friday, April 17th, 12-1:30 in HC White 6191. Including UW Professors Jill Casid (Art History), Michael Jay McClure (Art), and James Klausen (Political Science).
In his acerbic lectures, Appiah explores some of the central ethical questions of our time. How is it possible to consider the world a moral community, for instance, when there is so much disagreement about the nature of morality? He offers answers that are grounded in a new ethics (Cosmopolitanism) which celebrates our common humanity, while at the same time offers a practical way to manage our differences. With wit, reason and humanity, he offers a new approach to living a moral life in the modern age -- where the competing claims of “a Clash of Civilizations” on one hand, and a groundless moral relativism on the other, can make such a project seem impossible.
Download the Reading(s)
The Novel: History and Theory
