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A Conversation with Aimee Bender
The McCoy Center for Ethics and Society, in partnership with the Creative Writing Program, is pleased to present the explosive linguistic talent and boundary blurring short story writer and novelist, Aimee Bender. The author of three collections of short stories, a novel, and a novella, Bender is one of the most respected and anthologized fiction writers of her generation. From the groundbreaking debut Girl with Flammable Skirt to the emotive flavors of the Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Bender’s prose is, in the words…
Find out more »The Power of Photography for Social Change
REZA is an acclaimed photojournalist whose work has been featured in National Geographic, Time Magazine, Stern, Newsweek, El País, Paris Match, as well as a series of books, exhibitions and documentaries made for the National Geographic Channel. He discusses the importance of using images to serve social change, by training younger generations to become the actors of the future. Part of the Stanford Festival of Iranian Arts
Find out more »Queering Science Fiction: A Series of Readings and Discussions
Join us for a reading by local author Annalee Newitz from her book, Autonomous, and a post-reading Q&A session. Lunch will be served.
Find out more »Art Focus Lecture | The Art of Dante’s Divine Comedy
The Divine Comedy is one of the greatest works of western literature, and its narrative and dramatic elements have lent themselves for pictorial representation. This is particularly true for the Purgatory, whose seven stages correspond to the Seven Cardinal Sins. The first part of the presentation will introduce The Divine Comedy as a literary work and discuss its three parts: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. In the second part, we will move on to the illustrations in the work of Hieronymus…
Find out more »Lecture: Working Metal in 20th-Century Sculpture
5:30pm Lecture, Cantor Arts Center, Auditorium Working Metal in 20th-Century Sculpture is an intimate look at the expressive potential of metal worked directly by the artist’s hand using techniques and tools developed for industrial use. The artists featured in this exhibition, including Ruth Asawa, Harry Bertoia, and Melvin Edwards, exploited metal’s deep material and cultural resonances to create forms with extraordinary visual, tactile, and even sonic appeal. Exhibition curator, Sydney Skelton Simon, Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Curatorial Research Assistant and…
Find out more »Art Focus Lecture | From Judy Chicago to Cindy Sherman and Beyond: Transformations in Art and Feminism from the 70’s to Now
In the 1970s, Feminist Art garnered the attention of the art world and beyond. By the following generation, however, many young female artists had eschewed the imagery and strategies of their predecessors. For some viewers familiar with established practices, this new art appeared to possess little to no feminist content. But many of these young artists were simply shifting the terms by which an art by, for, and of women could be interpreted and understood. This lecture focuses on the…
Find out more »Intersections: Oscar Muñoz
Oscar Muñoz in conversation with Natalia Brizuela, Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Film and Media, University of California, Berkeley, and Elena Shtromberg, Associate Professor in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Utah. Oscar Muñoz is a visual artist born in 1951 in Popayán, Colombia. He is known as one of the most significant contemporary visual artists in his country, and his work has also gained international recognition. Most of his art is concerned…
Find out more »The Life Art Science Technology (LAST) Festival
The Life Art Science Technology (LAST) Festival on March 23-24, in the futuristic setting of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, will combine a program of science talks and art installations to discuss how technology is changing the nature of humanity and what role Silicon Valley is playing: How far can biomedicine extend life? Can a machine make art? Can we hack consciousness? What will virtual worlds do to our real world? Speakers include: Michael Snyder, Genetics, Stanford University Ken Goldberg, Robotics, UC…
Find out more »The Life Art Science Technology (LAST) Festival
The Life Art Science Technology (LAST) Festival on March 23-24, in the futuristic setting of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, will combine a program of science talks and art installations to discuss how technology is changing the nature of humanity and what role Silicon Valley is playing: How far can biomedicine extend life? Can a machine make art? Can we hack consciousness? What will virtual worlds do to our real world? Speakers include: Michael Snyder, Genetics, Stanford University Ken Goldberg, Robotics, UC…
Find out more »Art Focus Lecture | The Advantages of Obscurity: San Francisco Women Abstract Expressionists
Among the essential features of Abstract Expressionism in San Francisco was its lack of patronage—yet there were great advantages to this situation for women. Unlike their counterparts in the East, women artists in San Francisco never had to contend with what Alfonso Ossorio called the “doctrinaire powerhouses” that excluded them, leaving them free to pursue their own artistic inclinations. This presentation will discuss the women who benefited from working in a far less chauvinistic environment—artists like Jay DeFeo and Sonia…
Find out more »How to Save Politics in a Post-Truth Era: Thinking Through Difficult Times with Ilan Baron
Ilan Zvi Baron is an Associate Professor in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University, where he is also the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Jewish Culture, Society and Politics. He has published on International Relations theory, identity and security, dual loyalty, the Jewish Diaspora’s relationship with Israel and the international cultural politics of Israeli cuisine. His most recent books include, “Obligation in Exile: The Jewish Diaspora, Israel and Critique,” published by Edinburgh University Press,…
Find out more »Art Focus Lecture | Joan Mitchell: Painting as Cathedral
Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) came of age as an artist in the 1950s New York of the Cedar Tavern and the Artists’ Club. The physicality of her mark making—her commitment to abstraction, and her love of oil paint itself, not to mention her toughness—identify Mitchell as a New York School artist. Yet she spent more years in France than New York. While she continued down the path laid out by Abstract Expressionism, her work kept evolving and was, in the end, unclassifiable.…
Find out more »Ted Koppel – How to Lead a Meaningful Life
Ted Koppel, 2018 Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor, will be in conversation with The Rev. Professor Jane Shaw, Dean for Religious Life on how to lead a meaningful life. Journalist Ted Koppel was the anchor and managing editor of ABC News’ Nightline for 26 years, becoming the longest-serving news anchor in U.S. broadcast history. After leaving ABC in 2005, Koppel and his colleagues produced 20 hours of documentaries for the Discovery Network where he served as managing editor. Since then he has worked as a contributing…
Find out more »Jewish Museums in Europe: Cabinets of Curiosities or Theatres of History with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
What comes first? The collection or the story? What is the story the collection tells, and can the story the museum wants to tell be told through the collection? Given the politics of history and historical policies in Europe today, Jewish museums have a special role to play. Prague, Budapest, London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, Vienna – Jewish museums in these and other European cities have taken different approaches. Their strategies reflect not only the history of the institution and…
Find out more »Todd Lewis: “Reconfiguration and Revival: Newar Buddhist Traditions in the Kathmandu Valley (and Beyond)”
Bio: Todd Lewis, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA Abstract: Beginning with Sylvain Lévi, most scholars for the past century who have assessed the state of Newar Buddhism in the Kathmandu Valley have described the tradition as “decadent,” “corrupted by Hinduism,” and so in serious decline. Many predicted its withering away, most often due to competition from the reformist Theravādins, a movement that arrived in Nepal a century ago. The predations of the modern Nepalese state with its staunchly Hindu…
Find out more »A Reading with Ron Carlson, the Stein Visiting Writer
Ron Carlson’s most recent novel is Return to Oakpine. His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harpers, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and other journals, as well as The Best American Short Stories, The O’Henry Prize Series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and other anthologies; they have been performed on National Public Radio’s “This American Life” and “Selected Shorts.” Ron Carlson Writes a Story, his book on writing is taught widely. He is the author of two books of poems, Room Service and The Blue Box. He has been awarded…
Find out more »James A. Benn: “Controversies in the Doctrine and Practice of Self-immolation in Medieval China”
Abstract: In this seminar we will read selected passages from the chapter on self-immolation (sheshen pian 捨身篇) in the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist compendium Fayuan zhulin 法苑珠林. We will see how the compiler of the work—Daoshi 道世 (596?–683) places a range of somatic practices including burning the body within the context of the propagation of Buddhism. We will note how he deploys key jātaka tales and Mahāyāna sutras as scriptural supports for the practice, and reflect on his choice of hagiographical material from China. Bio: James A. Benn…
Find out more »Hisham Matar Reading, part of the Lane Lecture Series
Photo by Diana Matar Part of the Lane Lecture Series Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo, and has lived most of his adult life in London. His critically acclaimed 2016 memoir The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between won the Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography and received the PEN America Book of the Year Award. In The Return, he recounts his search for his father, who was…
Find out more »Art Focus Lecture | The Art of Making Space Public
Artists working in the public realm can accomplish far more than placing a beautiful artwork on a pedestal or in a plaza. Their work can transform space, stimulate human interaction, and help define community. This lecture will explore trends in public art over the last 30 years, from artists on the design team, to environmental art, new technologies, and art that promotes social justice. Barbara Goldstein is an independent consultant focusing on creative placemaking and public art planning. She is…
Find out more »Christensen Distinguished Lecture | Qiu Zhijie
Mapping the World Project Nearly a decade ago, Qiu Zhijie began to plot out intricate maps of the relationships among his various artworks. It was from this synthesis of research, writing, imagination, and action that the “Mapping the World Project” was born. In the hundreds of maps that have followed, the ink and brushwork of landscape painting outlines a coordinate system which condenses ideas, individuals, objects, incidents, and situations, weaving them together, and offering a possibility for understanding them in…
Find out more »A Conversation with Award-Winning South African Author Jonny Steinberg
Join us for an evening with best-selling author and Oxford University Professor of African Studies Jonny Steinberg. Professor Steinberg will give a talk, followed by a short reading of his forthcoming book One Day in Bethlehem, and a moderated Q&A session with Jeremy M. Weinstein, the Sakurako and William Fisher Family Director of the Stanford Global Studies Division. One Day in Bethlehem begins late in the evening of April 2, 1992, when, on the brink of apartheid’s end, the South African security police…
Find out more »“Denial”, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving with Deborah Lipstadt
Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory College Deborah received her B.A. from City College of New York (1969) and her M.A. (1972) and Ph.D. (1976) from Brandeis University. Professor Lipstadt is frequently called upon by the media to comment on a variety of matters. She has appeared Good Morning America, NPR’s Fresh Air, the BBC, Charlie Rose Show, and is a frequent contributor to and is widely quoted in a variety of newspapers…
Find out more »Tim H. Barrett: “A Possible Buddhist Influence on Chinese Political Thought”
Abstract: Much work has been done in recent decades on the way in which Chinese rulers made use of Buddhism to bolster their power, but in fact some Buddhist ideas concerning kingship found in South Asian materials were quite negative. China was in imperial times an autocracy in which such negativity towards kingship generally did not flourish. But if we look carefully, is there really no trace at all of these Buddhist ideas entering the Chinese tradition of political thought? …
Find out more »The Polish Roots of Right-Wing Zionism with Daniel Heller
Daniel K. Heller, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at McGill University How interwar Poland and its Jewish youth were instrumental in shaping the ideology of right-wing Zionism By the late 1930s, as many as fifty thousand Polish Jews belonged to Betar, a youth movement known for its support of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of right-wing Zionism. Poland was not only home to Jabotinsky’s largest following. The country also served as an inspiration and incubator for the development of right-wing Zionist…
Find out more »The Ruined House with Ruby Namdar
Ruby Namdar, author Ruby Namdar was born and raised in Jerusalem to a family of Iranian-Jewish heritage. His first book, Haviv (2000) won The Ministry of Culture’s Award for Best First Publication. His novel The Ruined House has won the Sapir Prize—Israel’s most prestigious literary award. In The Ruined House, an elegant NYU professor at the peak of his powers is reduced to a quivering puddle by a violent, unsought, yearlong spiritual awakening. Jumping between New York of 2000 and the Holy Temple…
Find out more »When Vilna was Young: Vilna’s Last Generation with Justin Cammy
Justin Cammy is a literary and cultural historian with research and teaching interests in Yiddish and modern Jewish literatures, Eastern European Jewish history, and Zionism and contemporary Israel. He holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University and a B.A. in Middle Eastern studies from McGill University. In addition to appointments in Jewish studies and comparative literature, he also is a member of Smith’s Programs in Middle East studies, Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian studies, and American…
Find out more »What the Future Holds: In Conversation with Walter Mosley
What the Future Holds: In Conversation with Walter Mosley Novelist and social commentator Walter Mosley is best known for his crime fiction, and his indelible narrator, Easy Rawlins. But Mosley, a frequent social commentator and wide-ranging writer, is also a serious practitioner of Science Fiction. He employs the form not just to contemplate the culture as it was, but to envision the trends that might point to our future. These envisionings are rarely optimistic, but always prescient. Over the course…
Find out more »Rupert Gethin: “On Death and Rebirth, and What Happens in Between: Two Buddhist Accounts of Why it Matters”
Abstract: Ancient Indian Buddhist thinkers for the most part took it as given that death was followed by rebirth, but they disagreed on whether death was followed immediately by rebirth or by an in between state (antarābhava). The lecture will consider two accounts of death and rebirth, both from the fourth to fifth centuries CE but representing the traditions of two different schools: (1) the account found in Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa, which presents the traditions of the Sarvāstivāda school and advocates an in between state, and (2) the account found in the…
Find out more »Making Hungary Great Again: State Building, Mass Violence, and the Irony of Global Holocaust Memory in Twentieth-Century Europe with Raz Segal
Raz Segal, Assistant Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Sara and Sam Schoffer Professor of Holocaust Studies at Stockton University Dr. Segal is engaged in his work with the challenges of exploring the Holocaust as an integral part of modern processes of imperial collapse, the formation and occasional deformation of nation-states, and their devastating impact on the societies they sought (and seek) to break and remake. Integrative and comparative, his research stands at the intersection of modern European history, Holocaust scholarship, Genocide Studies, and Jewish history, and links the Holocaust to…
Find out more »The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age with Steven P. Weitzman
Steven Weitzman, Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures, Ella Darivoff Director of the Katz Center of Advanced Judaic Studies at Pennsylvania University Prof. Weitzman specializes in the Hebrew Bible and the origins of Jewish culture. Recent publications include Surviving Sacrilege: Cultural Persistence in Jewish Antiquity(Harvard University Press, 2005); Religion and the Self in Antiquity (Indiana University Press, 2005); The Jews: A History (Prentice Hall, 2009); and a biography of King Solomon, part of the new “Jewish Lives” series, published by Yale University Press in…
Find out more »Oliver Freiberger: “Lines in Water? On Drawing Buddhism’s Boundaries in Ancient India”
Abstract: This talk explores the ways in which religious agents – and modern scholars – distinguish religions. Illustrated by examples from ancient India, it will problematize the popular notion of blurred boundaries and suggest a multilayered approach for analyzing religious boundary-making. The paper argues that scholars should be prepared to find, even within one religious community, numerous and possibly conflicting ways of drawing a boundary between “us” and “them.” Bio: Dr. Oliver Freiberger is associate professor of Asian Studies and…
Find out more »Robert Daniel DeCaroli: “Snakes and the Rain: Nāga Imagery, Water Management, and Buddhist Rainmaking Rituals in Early South Asia”
Abstract: When considering the water-related challenges that confronted the monks and architects involved with rock-cut monasteries, it becomes apparent that the veneration of nāgas complimented methods of hydraulic engineering designed to regulate the flow of water at the sites. The highly visible nature of this arrangement helps to explain the emergence of ritual texts, primarily dating to after the fourth century CE, in which Buddhist ritualists adopt the role of rainmakers. The ritualists invariably invoke a special relationship with the…
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