Taking its point of departure from a thread of references to Palestine in Derrida’s writings, from Glas to his last texts, this lecture seeks to demonstrate that these key passages can be a resource for us as we navigate our way through the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian...
This talk will take you into the process of creating a new, experimental opera based on a historical ghost story from Pu Songling’s seventeenth-century Chinese masterpiece, Liaozhao’s Strange Tales (Liaozhai zhiyi). Entitled Ghost Village, the opera is a creative collaboration between Judith Zeitlin, as scholar...
Based on three research projects on aesthetic environments, this talk will discuss how and when humans and things become objects or subjects. Focusing on the figures of the opera fan, the shoe fit model, and the museum custodian, the lecture will delve into the passivity...
Resisting the tide of repression that threatens the teaching of Black history, we should look to that past to understand the ongoing processes that have shaped our world. Our current predicament, marked by extreme inequalities, everyday violence, militarism, and political strife derives in part from...
Models of the passage from midlife to old age—from Freud, Proust, and Simone de Beauvoir to contemporary conversations about how old is too old to be an American president—disclose the ageism, including internalized ageism, rampant in our culture, with aging figured overwhelmingly as decline. Today,...
In this talk, Stephanie McCarter will discuss her recent translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Penguin, 2022). She will first address her tactics for transforming Ovid's poetic and metrical effects into English verse. She will then outline her strategies for interpreting and rendering Ovid's themes of sexual...
Over the last decade, the persecution of Uyghurs in China has attracted global attention. When Uyghur was officially banned from education by the Chinese government in September 2016, Uyghur editors were arrested and heavily sentenced, and books were collected and burned. Private bookstores were shut...
March 14, 2023 marked the beginning of a new era: Chat GPT-4 was released, fundamentally changing the way humans relate to language. In this talk, Professor Park will explore the implications of this pivotal moment. She will consider AI’s impact on the production of works...
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night begins with a shipwreck, a violent birth onto unknown shores that separates orphaned twins on a journey to nowhere. The turbulent sea visualizes an environment of passages–into adulthood, towards sexual identity, and in search of new attachments and communities of belonging. Twelfth...
The IHC’s 2024-25 public events series will explore Key Passages: processes of transition and experiences of transformation—historical events, social movements, global dislocations, and journeys undertaken—that have altered thought, shifted cultural paradigms, or sparked other forms of consequential change. The series will also examine temporal passages,...