Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/12/2012
4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Location
JFSB B037
Category(ies) No Categories
The grand launch of the Center will be on Friday, October 12th, 4:00-6:00, in B002 JFSB. Our speaker will be Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Director of the National Humanities Center. Professor Harpham literally wrote the book about the humanities; fittingly, his talk is entitled “Finding Ourselves: The Humanities as a Discipline.” Anybody who has read anything from Professor Harpham’s considerable body of work knows how engaging and interesting it is–hence his current position. A reception will follow his talk.
Geoffrey Galt Harpham was trained as a literary scholar, but his work has encompassed a wide range of topics and fields. Among his many books are On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (1982); Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (1999); and Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity (2002). His longstanding scholarly interests include the role of ethics in literary study, the place of language in intellectual history, and the work of Joseph Conrad. He has collaborated with M. H. Abrams on A Glossary of Literary Terms, now in its tenth edition. In recent years, he has become a prominent historian of and advocate for the humanities; The Humanities and the Dream of America appeared in 2011. He has received fellowships from the J. S. Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Under his leadership, the National Humanities Center has sponsored initiatives that have encouraged dialogue between the humanities and the natural and social sciences.
