Spring 2007

Noam Chomsky will speak about linguistics in a lecture titled, "The Mysteries of Nature: How Deeply Hidden?"

Elizabeth S. Spelke, Professor of Psychology, Harvard University and Virginia Valian, Professor of Psychology, Hunter College

A Two-day Conference on the Concept of Character

"An Emergent India: Prospects and Problems" A public conversation between Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate economist, and Prabhat Patnaik, perhaps India's most distinguished left wing economist.  

Princeton Professor K. Anthony Appiah interviews African novelist Nuruddin Farah about his new novel, Knots.

Long an inspiration for artists working in forms as varied as poetry, painting, dance, cinema, and fiction, Oliver Sacks, dubbed by The New York Times as "the poet laureate of medicine," has written recently, "We have, as yet, scarcely touched the question of why music, for better or worse, has so much power. It is a question that goes to the heart of being human." Professor Sacks will speak about "Music and Mind" in the Faculty Room of Low Library on Wednesday, March 7th at 6:15pm. Eric Kandel, Nobel Laureate and University Professor at Columbia University, will chair.

Svetlana Alpers, Professor Emerita of the History of Art, University of California, Berkeley, is currently Visiting Scholar, Department of Fine Arts, at New York University. Her most recent publication is The Vexations of Art: Velazquez and Others. Her lecture will be titled, "Instances of Distance." Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory, Columbia University, will respond.

Perry Anderson, distinguished Professor of History at UCLA, editor of New Left Review, and author of Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas will speak on two consecutive evenings in Davis Auditorium of the Schapiro Center.

PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF LOCATION: Due to the cold weather, this event will be held indoors, in the Rotunda of Low Memorial Library. Pulitzer prize winning graphic novelist, Art Spiegelman is in residence at the Heyman Center for the Humanities for the Spring 2007 Semester. He will speak about "Comics: Marching into the Canon" on Monday, April 9 at 7pm.

The 2007 Lionel Trilling Seminar Respondents: Andrew Delbanco and Jean Strouse Hermione Lee, "The Hum and Buzz of Implication: Biography and Edith Wharton.”

HE 2006-2007 SAID MEMORIAL LECTURE "Moral Imagination" Tuesday, 17 April 6:15pm David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English at Yale University, is a renowned authority on Romantic and modern poetry, and on the history of literary criticism. His publications include Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, about metaphysician, painter, critic and essayist William Hazlitt, 1778-1830, which was a National Book Critics Circle finalist in 1984; Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790s; and A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost.

Gerald Edelman, Nobel Prize winning scientist, and Lorraine Daston, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany will discuss together, "The Origins of Norms: The Place of Value in a World of Nature," as part of a three day conference jointly sponsored with The Philoctetes Center.