Dartmouth Events

Conceived and facilitated by Montgomery Fellow, Hortense J. Spillers, and Visiting Assistant Professor, Rich Blint, this public seminar brings together students in all three of their fall term courses for an exploration of pressing questions of our time. From climate catastrophe, increased polarization around categories of human difference, seemingly endless and ever-widening wars, these thematic queries register as urgent and vital: What is the function of humanities instruction during a period of global volatility and contraction? What lessons can be gleaned from the serious study of theorists, philosophers, novelists, poets, and other creative writers who produced work during previous moments of shared emergency and calamity? And, finally, how might we clear as much ground for engagement, interlocution, and discovery at institutions of higher education and beyond when moral and historically grounded exchange appears in danger of censure in nearly every arena of public, personal, and professional life?

This event is jointly sponsored by the Departments of English and Creative Writing, African and African American Studies, the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program, the Montgomery Fellows Program, and the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life.

Image Credit: Arthur Jafa, Omega Sci Fi, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York/Rome