The Humanities Center has announced its slate of public lecture series speakers for this year’s theme of “memory and forgetting.”
Art and cultural critic Douglas Crimp, the Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History and a professor of visual and cultural studies at Rochester, will deliver a lecture titled “Relying on Memory: From AIDS to Merce Cunningham” on September 26 at 5 p.m. in Conference Room D of the Humanities Center. Crimp is a noted art and cultural critic whose newest book, Before Pictures, relies on his own recollections of and reflections on the gay world and the art world in midcentury New York City.
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, will speak on October 25 at 5 p.m. in the Interfaith Chapel. He is the author of novels including My Name Is Red, The Museum of Innocence, and most recently, The Red-Haired Woman. Over his 40-year career, his work has been translated into more than 60 languages. Pamuk’s lecture is titled “Memories and Myths.”
Early-American historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich will speak on November 16 at 5 p.m. The author of a phrase that has become ubiquitous on bumper stickers and T-shirts—“Well-behaved women seldom make history”—Ulrich is the 300th Anniversary University Professor in Harvard’s history department. She earned a Pulitzer Prize for her book A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812. Her newest book is A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism.
Contemporary artist Walid Raad ’96 (PhD) will speak on January 25 at 5 p.m. Raised in Lebanon during its civil war, Raad is the creator of works in photography, video, and performance that consider the role of memory and narrative in discourse about conflict. In 2015, the Museum of Modern Art hosted the first comprehensive American exhibition of his work.
Neuroscientist Daniela Schiller will speak on April 12 at 5 p.m. Schiller researches the cognitive science of emotional and traumatic memories. She is a professor of neuroscience and an associate professor of psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her work was the subject of a 2014 New Yorker article titled “Partial Recall.”
The year’s lectures will be complemented by a companion film series on memory and forgetting, developed with the Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman Museum. Details of the film series will be announced on the Humanities Center website.
Two other major annual events at the center—the Distinguished Visiting Humanist program and the Ferrari Humanities Symposia—will offer public lectures, as well, on topics and at times yet to be announced.
Author John Edgar Wideman will visit the University March 21–23, as this year’s Distinguished Visiting Humanist. A professor emeritus at Brown University, Wideman was the first two-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, for his novels Sent for You Yesterday and Philadelphia Fire. His work centers on the lives of black men in urban America.
An expert in the work of Michelangelo and Renaissance art and architecture, art historian William Wallace will visit the University March 26–28 for this year’s Ferrari Humanities Symposia. The Barbara Murphy Bryant Distinguished Professor of Art History at Washington University in St. Louis, Wallace is the author of seven books on Michelangelo, including Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and His Times and Discovering Michelangelo: The Art Lover’s Guide to Understanding Michelangelo’s Masterpieces.
