The Humanities Institute is pleased to continue the 2018-2020 Distinguished Visiting Lecture Series, “Narrative and Social Justice" in the Fall.

The Distinguished Visiting Lecture Series is free and open to the public.

Upcoming Lectures in the 2019 Distinguished Visiting Lecture Series:

Wednesday, September 11 (Avaya Auditorium) – Robin Lakoff, PhD, Professor of Linguistics (Emerita), The University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Lakoff will speak on the use of narrative control in maintaining power.

Wednesday, October 23 (Avaya Auditorium) – Jason De León, PhD, Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (starting July 2019) and Director of the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP). Dr. De León will speak on migration narratives.

HI and Dell Medical School's Health and Humanities Research Seminar Series Continues

In Spring 2019 the Humanities Institute continues to host its series of Health & Humanities Research Seminars in partnership with Dell Medical School. The research seminars are a follow-up to the May 2018 Health and Humanities Pop-Up Institute and are intended to engage scholars and practitioners across the health and humanities disciplines in research-oriented dialogue. Designed primarily for faculty, research staff, and health providers, the seminars feature presentations from speakers followed by a group discussion and then casual conversation over refreshments. Past presenters from this semester include Dr. Lynn Harter, Professor and Co-Director of the Barbara Geralds Institute for Storytelling and Social Impact in the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University; Dr. David Ring, Associate Dean for Comprehensive Care, Professor of Surgery and Perioperative Care, and Professor of Psychiatry at Dell Medical School; Dr. Alison Kafer, Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UT Austin; and Dr. William Sage, the James R. Dougherty Chair for Faculty Excellence at the UT School of Law, and Professor of Surgery and Perioperative Care at Dell Medical School. Learn more about the Humanities Institute's Health and Humanities initiatives HERE.

The Humanities Institute’s final research seminar of the semester will consist of a presentation given by Dr. Laurie Green on May 6th. Laurie Green is an Associate Professor of History at UT Austin who specializes in research on topics revolving around race and gender in the twentieth-century U.S.; social movements; and cultural studies. Her talk is titled “’Hunger’, ‘Malnutrition,’ or ‘Starvation’? The High Stakes of Language in the 1960s US.”

Dr. Green is the co-editor of Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America (2014). She is the winner of the 2008 Phillip Taft Labor History Book Award and a finalist for 2008 OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for her monograph Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle (2007). Dr. Laurie Green earned her BA in Sociology at Wesleyan University in 1979, followed by a M.A. in History & Archival Management from New York University and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago.

Seats for the seminars are limited and available by advance reservation. You can contact seminar organizer Phillip Barrish (pbarrish@austin.utexas.edu) for more information.

The Health and Humanities Research Seminar Series is sponsored by the Humanities Institute and Dell Medical School.

Philology, Resistance, and Radical Rewriting: Readings of Classical Texts in Africa and the Black Diaspora

by Ricky Shear, HI Graduate Research Assistant

Dr. Emily Greenwood, Chair and Professor of Classics at Yale University, was the guest leader of the March 14th Faculty Fellows Seminar and the first lecturer in the Humanities Institute’s Distinguished Visiting Lecturer Series, “Narrative and Social Justice.” In both her lecture and the seminar Greenwood discussed her interest in using philology--the study of the structure and historical development of language--to analyze the “politics and poetics of responding to, interpreting, adapting, and writing back to Greek and Roman Classics in Anglophone literature in Africa and the black diaspora.” Her lecture, “Philology and Reparation: Resisting Anti-Human Errors in Great Books,” analyzed Aristotle’s justification of slavery in Politics, emphasizing the ethical importance of detailed attention to how the historical development of language causes words to take on historically situated meanings and connotations while revealing how Civil Rights Movement participants and leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. referenced and refuted Aristotle’s writing to claim that dehumanization is the heart of slavery.