The College of Arts and Sciences’ Spring 2021 Sir Run Run Shaw Lecture Series will kick off on February 3 with “Revolutionizing Learning,” featuring Professor Cathy N. Davidson from the Graduate Center, CUNY. The series continues on Thursday, March 11, with “From Geography to Geology and Meteorology: Environmental Poetics of the ‘Critical Zone’ in Latin American Culture,” featuring Jörg Dünne from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Spring 2021 Series
Wednesday, February 3, 4 pm via Zoom
“Revolutionizing Learning”
Featuring Professor Cathy N. Davidson of the Graduate Center, CUNY
Register by February 2
In “Revolutionizing Learning,” Professor Cathy N. Davidson, distinguished cultural historian of technology and learning science, addresses the academy we’ve inherited and the one we might aspire to become. She looks at the ways the catastrophes of the present moment illuminate the long institutional histories of hierarchy and inequality embedded in our practices and asks what we each can do now, in the realms over which we have power, to foster pedagogies of empowerment and social justice. In the words of bell hooks, we have an “awesome responsibility” to admit our “power to change the direction of our students’ lives.” That begins with examining the direction of our own lives and institutions.
Presented by the Departments of English and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and The Humanities Institute.
Thursday, March 11, 4 pm via Zoom
“From Geography to Geology and Meteorology: Environmental Poetics of the ‘Critical Zone’ in Latin American Culture”
Featuring Professor Jörg Dünne of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
This lecture discusses the possible consequences for literary and cultural studies of a “verticalization” of thinking about the earth as a “critical zone” where human agency interacts with geological and meteorological environments, an approach that comes from earth system studies. Taking the example of Argentinean literature and its rewriting of traditional representations of the pampas as a desert, a horizontal space that can be taken into possession, the aim will be to describe some elements of a possible environmental poetics of the critical zone as a contribution to the ongoing debate about what has been called the “Anthropocene” for the Humanities.
Presented by the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature.
Additional lectures will be announced soon. For more information on the Sir Run Run Shaw Lecture Series, click here.
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