Annual Distinguished Lecturer

This major annual university and community event will feature a national or international scholar focusing on the human dimensions of an emerging socio-cultural issue.

2011 Lecture

What Makes Us Human? Visual Thinking and Different Kinds of Minds

Temple Grandin, one of Time Magazine’s 2010 list of 100 Most Influential People, is an animal behavioral scientist, a bestselling author and a Professor in the Department of Animal Science atColorado State University. Dr. Grandin was diagnosed with autism as a toddler in 1950, learning to speak at age three and a half with the aid of speech therapy and early intervention. She first spoke in public about autism and her own experiences in the mid-1980’s, becoming well-known after being described by Oliver Sacks in the title narrative of his book An Anthropologist on Mars.

Watch Dr. Grandin's Lecture here.

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2010 Lecture

The Humanities as Power: Law, Poetry, Jazz and Civic Engagement

Patricia J. Williams is James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University. A graduate of Wellesley College and Harvard Law School, she has served on faculties of the University of Wisconsin School of Law, Harvard University's Women's Studies Program, and the City University of New York Law School at Queen's College. She is the recipient of the Alumnae Achievement Award from Wellesley, the Graduate Society Medal from Harvard, and the MacArthur foundation “genius” grant.

Patricia Williams reflected on her use of interdisciplinarity as a form of advocacy.  From her collaborations with poet and jazz saxophonist Oliver Lake to her deployment of literary and journalistic techniques in her political writing, she explored the art of 'making a case' with the humanities.

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2009 Lecture

Living with the Humanities

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor and the Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.  B.A. English (Honors), Presidency College, Calcutta, 1959.  Ph.D. Comparative Literature, Cornell University, 1967. D. Litt, University of Toronto, 1999; D. Litt, Univeristy of London, 2003.

Why is it important to support and protect humanities research in an era of globalization? As the IHR's 2009 Distinguished Lecturer, Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak of Columbia University addresses that question historically, in a context somewhat broader than Europe and the U.S. Her talk tracks the role of humanities-work both inside and beyond the university, especially through the contributions of today’s public intellectuals. She also addresses contemporary curtailments of academic freedom and their implications for the future of the humanities.

Watch Professor Spivak's lecture here.

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2008 Lecture

The Humanities and the Limits of the Human

Dr. Michael Bérubé, Paterno Family Professor in Literature, Department of English, and Co-Director, Disability Studies Program, Pennsylvania State University.

Michael Bérubé is the author of six books to date: Marginal Forces / Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (Cornell University Press, 1992); Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (Verso, 1994); Life As We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child (Pantheon, 1996; paper edition, Vintage, 1998); The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies (New York University Press, 1998); What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “ Bias” in Higher Education (W. W. Norton, 2006) and Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). He is also the editor of The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (Blackwell, 2004), and, with Cary Nelson, of Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (Routledge, 1995). Bérubé has written over 150 essays for a wide variety of academic journals such as American Quarterly, the Yale Journal of Criticism, Social Text, Modern Fiction Studies, and the minnesota review, as well as more popular venues such as Harper's, the New Yorker, Dissent, The New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Nation, and the Boston Globe.

Life As We Know It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 1996 and was chosen as one of the best books of the year (on a list of seven) by Maureen Corrigan of National Public Radio.

Dr. Bérubé's lecture is available from iTunes U.

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2007 Lecture

After the Humanities

Dr. Marjorie Garber, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and American Literature and Language and of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, where she is also Chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts Harvard University.

What is the relation of the humanities today to the sciences, the social sciences, or the creative arts? At the same time that their boundaries are being breached and expanded by adjacent disciplines, the humanities are under persistent critique for two paradoxical reasons: first, that they are not relevant to present-day concerns, and second, that their interest in relevancy devalues traditional works and approaches. How have changes in the structure and content of higher education, and, indeed, the goals and strategies of universities and colleges, affected the standing and nature of the humanities? What comes after the humanities—both within university culture, and in the professional, social, and political world?

2006 Lecture

Academic Norms and Critical Inquiry: Challenges of Difficult Times

Dr. Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California Berkeley. 

Recent debates suggest that "academic freedom" is a concept used by both liberal and conservative intellectuals, characterizing very different ideals for academic education. But what kind of "freedom" is at stake for both of these positions? Is there a critical position to be formulated that sidesteps the impasses produced by both liberal and conservative views on this question? And how do debates on academic freedom fit into larger political struggles over state control and surveillance as well as new rights discourses? What challenges have gender and sexuality studies posed to disciplinary paradigms? This talk will address these questions and others of critical interest in the humanities.