Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/13/2025
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location
4010 JFSB
Category(ies)
The Humanities Center welcomes Jennifer Banks, Yale University Press, as our colloquium speaker on Thursday, February 13th at 3:00 pm in 4010 JFSB. Her presentation will focus on the importance of birth and its relationship with language. We hope you will join us.
Title: “Natality: Toward a New Language for Birth”
In the wake of the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt described natality as the “miracle that saves the world” as she argued for birth as an inescapable part of the human condition. Working through the collapse of Western civilization, she was writing against an intellectual tradition that had emphasized mortality and not natality, the term she used to describe birth’s active and ongoing role in our lives. In this talk, Jennifer Banks draws on her recently published book Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth, to engage with Arendt’s insights and consider what they mean for us today, at a time of falling natality rates, transhumanist aspiration, increasing isolation, polarization, and ecological crisis. She’ll particularly focus on the relationship between birth and language. Why have our intellectual traditions underemphasized birth? Why are rising literacy rates and falling natality rates so highly correlated? And how might we, people committed to language and ideas, find new ways to think about, talk about, and write about birth with honesty, humility, awe, creativity, and sympathy in the twenty-first century?
About our guest:
Jennifer Banks is Senior Executive Editor at Yale University Press where she has acquired books on literature, religion, and philosophy since 2007. She has also worked at ICM Partners, the Continuum International Publishing Group, and Harvard University Press. A graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the author of Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth, published by W.W. Norton.
