Fall 2009

Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the University Library at Harvard University. He will speak on "Google, Libraries, and the Digital Future."

Marshall Sahlins is one of the most prominent American anthropologists of our time. He holds the title of Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he currently teaches. He will speak on "The Western Illusion of Human Nature."

Rita Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995 and as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. She has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She will read from a selection of her poetry and then discuss her work with Marcellus Blount of the Columbia English Department.

Speakers include Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at McGill University and winner of the 2007 Templeton Prize and the 2008 Kyoto Prize; Alan Montefiore, Emeritus Fellow, Balliol College, Oxford; and Emmanuel Picavet, Professor of Political Philosophy, University of Paris.

Robert Pippin, Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago, will speak on "Who Cares Who Shot Liberty Valance?: The Prosaic and the Heroic in John Ford’s Film." Responding will be James Schamus, President of Focus Features, and Geoffrey O'Brien, Editor-in-Chief, Library of America.

Daniel Kahneman is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, Princeton University and winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. Responding will be Jon Elster, Robert K. Merton Professor of Social Sciences,Columbia University; George Ainslie, Chief Psychiatrist, Veterans Affairs Medical Center Coatesville, PA and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Temple University; and Walter Mischel, Niven Professor of Humane Letters in Psychology, Columbia University.

Participants in this conference on academic freedom will include Judith Butler,Maxine Elliot Professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, the University of California, Berkeley; David Bromwich,Sterling Professor of English, Yale University; Robert Zimmer, President of the University of Chicato; and Richard Shweder, William Claude Reavis Distinguished Service Professor of Human Development, University of Chicago.

Quentin Skinner, Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London, and England's great intellectual historian of political thought of the Cambridge School, will speak on, “Word and Image in Renaissance Moral Thought.”

Carol Gilligan is Professor of Humanities and Applied Psychology at New York University. She is an internationally acclaimed psychologist and prolific writer. Nancy Chodorow is a feminist sociologist and psychoanalyst, and is widely considered today's leading psychoanalytic feminist theorist. Together, Professors Gilligan and Chodorow will speak on "Transforming Psychology."

Charles Taylor returns to speak on the question, "Can Human Action Be Explained?".

Jonathan Israel, Professor of Modern European History, Institute for Advanced Study, will speak on "Dutch Cities, Radical Enlightenment and the 'General Revolution' (1776-1790)".

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He will read a selection of poems, to be followed by an interview with Saskia Hamilton of the Barnard College English Department.

Caroline Bynum, Professor of Western European Middle Ages at the Institute for Advanced Study will speak on "What Is Happening in History Now?". Discussants include Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University; Alan Brinkley, Allan Nevins Professor of History, Columbia University; Victoria de Grazia, Moore Collegiate Professor of History, Columbia University; and Pamela Smith, Professor of History, Columbia University.

This day long conference will include, among others, Stanley Fish, Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Professor of Law, Florida International University; Catharine Stimpson, University Professor, Professor of English, and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science, New York University; and Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University.

Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor and professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, returns to the Heyman Center to deliver the 5th Annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture.

Ezra Tawil, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, will speak on "American Exceptionalism and the Question of Style." His Columbia colleagues Andrew Delbanco and Ross Posnock will serve as commentators.

Amartya Sen, Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Harvard University, is the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics, and will speak on "Social Choice and Individual Values." Kenneth Arrow, recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Economics, and Eric Maskin, recipient of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics, will serve as Respondents. Joseph Stiglitz, recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, will chair.