EVENT DETAILS

"The Humanities in a Time of Ecological and Constitutional Crises"

Please join us for a talk by Robert Newman, President and Director of the National Humanities Center. 

Please rsvp by Jan. 30:  bit.ly/HCNewman

Drawing on E. O. Wilson’s renaming of the Anthropocene as the Eremocene, or Age of Loneliness, this talk considers the crisis of climate change also as a Constitutional crisis as well as a crucial moment for the intervention of the humanities. It looks to the idea of the public good, fundamental to the revolutionary idealism behind the American Constitution, as a potential antidote to this situation and argues that humanities educators and practitioners must play a central role in its implementation. To do so, we need to avoid a capitulation to narrow definitions of value that evade the nuance and complexity so ingrained in the humanities and to broaden our conceptions of our profession and our pedagogy.Reception to follow in the Humanities Center (First Floor, HG)