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?
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.
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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.
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.
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 at Colorado State University. 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-1980s.
Coco Fusco, an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and the Director of Intermedia Initiatives at Parsons The New School for Design, spoke on the other side of immigration—those who don’t make it to the U.S. because of interference by the U.S. government or their home government.
As the IHR’s 2013 Distinguished Lecturer, Donna Haraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz and author of "Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature," called upon her audience to work, play and think in terms of multispecies cosmopolitics, a new approach to recuperating the Terrapolis on which we live.
To watch the video of the 2014 IHR Annual Distinguished Lecturer, Stephen Greenblatt
This video is password protected and limited to the larger ASU community. Please contact the IHR at ihr@asu.edu or 480.965.3000 to obtain the password.
Does science ever intersect with art, language, and literature? Physicist, novelist, essayist, and author of the bestseller Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman, explored this question and investigated the relationship between the sciences and the humanities in the 2015 IHR Distinguished Lecture in February of 2015.