• Natalie Zemon Davis
• Adjunct Professor of History, Senior Fellow in Comparative Literature, and Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto
• February 25, 2010 @ 7:30 pm
• Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
• This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.

• Catherine Malabou
• Maître de conférences in the Philosophy Department at the Université Paris-X Nanterre
• Is Plasticity a New name for Freedom?
• March 10, 2010 @ 7:30 pm
• Chazen Museum of Art, L160 (Elvehjem Building)
• This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.

• The most recent research in biology aims at putting into question the concept of genetic programming. Today, epigenetics tends to be more important than genetics itself. Three main discoveries explain this shift: the discovery of interfering RNA; the discovery of stem cells; and the discovery of neural plasticity. In this lecture, philosopher Catherine Malabou focuses on plasticity, which explains that our brain develops itself for the most part after birth and is modeled by experience, education, and learning. Malabou considers how the discovery of neural plasticity challenges philosophical and political conventions, in particular the belief that philosophy and technoscience are opposed. She explores what happens to a politics of emancipation and resistance when science no longer is the name of the enemy, and asks what is the future of philosophy in an era of plasticity and epigentics.

• Catherine Malabou teaches philosophy in Paris and at the University at Buffalo. Her recent publications include What Should We Do With Our Brain? (Fordham, 2009) and Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (Columbia, 2009) in English, and Changer le différence, le feminine et la question philosophique (Galilée, 2009) in French.

• Paola Antonelli
• Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art
• April 26, 2010 @ 7:30 pm
• Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
• This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
• Paola Antonelli is one of the world’s foremost design experts and was recently rated as one of the top one hundred most powerful people in the world of art by Art Review. She is a Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. The recipient of a laurea degree in Architecture from the Politecnico di Milano university in 1990, Antonelli has curated several architecture and design exhibitions in Italy, France, and Japan. She has been a Contributing Editor for Domus magazine (1987-91) and the Design Editor of Abitare (1992-94). She has also contributed articles to several publications, among them Metropolis, the Harvard Design Review, I.D. magazine, Paper, Metropolitan Home, Harper’s Bazaar, and Nest.

Previously

• Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng
• An Evening with Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng
• November 4, 2009 @ 7:30 pm
• Chazen Museum of Art, L160 (Elvehjem Building)
• This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.

• Dave Eggers is the author of six previous books, including his most recent, Zeitoun, a nonfiction account a Syrian-American immigrant and his extraordinary experience during Hurricane Katrina and What Is the What, a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award. That book, about Valentino Achak Deng, a survivor of the civil war in southern Sudan, gave birth to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, run by Mr. Deng and dedicated to building secondary schools in southern Sudan. Eggers is the founder and editor of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco that produces a quarterly journal, a monthly magazine (The Believer), and Wholphin, a quarterly DVD of short films and documentaries. In 2002, with Nínive Calegari he co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for youth in the Mission District of San Francisco. Local communities have since opened sister 826 centers in Chicago, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Ann Arbor, Seattle, and Boston. In 2004, Eggers taught at the University of California–Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and there, with Dr. Lola Vollen, he co-founded Voice of Witness, a series of books using oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. In addition, The Wild Things novel based loosely on the storybook by Maurice Sendak and the screenplay co-written with Spike Jonze, will be available in bookstores. A native of Chicago, Eggers graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in journalism. He now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two children.

  
  Valentino Achak Deng was born in southern Sudan, in the village of Marial Bai. He fled Sudan in the late 1980’s during civil war, when his village was destroyed by murahaleen—the same type of militia that currently terrorize Darfur. Deng grew up in Ethiopian and Kenyan refugee camps, where he worked for the UNHCR as a social advocate and reproductive health educator. In 2001 he resettled to Atlanta. Deng has toured the US and Europe speaking about his life in Sudan, his experience as a refugee, and his collaboration with author Dave Eggers on What Is the What, the novelized version of Deng’s life story. As a leader in the Sudanese diaspora, Deng advocates for the universal right to education and the freedom of his people in Sudan. In 2006, Deng and Eggers established the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation to help rebuild Sudanese communities by increasing access to educational opportunities. The Foundation has constructed the very first high school in Valentino’s region of Southern Sudan, which opened in May 2009, and plans for a library, teacher-training college, and community center are currently underway. www.valentinoachakdeng.org

• This event is made possible by generous support from the Brittingham Visiting Scholars Fund, the Lectures Committee, and the Anonymous Fund of the UW-Madison.

• Evelyn Fox Keller
• Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science, MIT, Emerita
• Human Nature, Human Nurture, and the Mirage of a Space between the Two
• October 2, 2009 @ 7:30 pm
• Chazen Museum of Art, L160 (Elvehjem Building)
• This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.

• In this talk, Evelyn Fox Keller focuses on the idea that the causes of trait development can be parsed into two categories: nature and nurture. She argues that this fundamentally incoherent notion, which still persists in both the popular and technical imagination, was the innovation of Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911). It was spurred in part by his particulate theories of inheritance and has been sustained, again in part, by chronic slippages in the language of genetics.

  Evelyn Fox Keller’s research focuses on the history and philosophy of modern biology and on gender and science. She is the author of several books, including A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (1983), Reflections on Gender and Science (1985), The Century of the Gene (2000), and Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors and Machines (2002). Her most recent book, The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture, is now in press.

   

• Michael Pollan
• John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism, University of California Berkeley
• In Defense of Food: The Omnivore’s Solution
• September 24, 2009 @ 7:00 pm
• Kohl Center
• This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.

• Miss the lecture? View an edited version of Michael Pollan's speech here

  Real food--the kind of food your great-grandmother would recognize as food—is being undermined by science on one side and the food industry on the other, both of whom want us focus on nutrients, good and bad, rather than actual plants, animals and fungi. The rise of “nutritionism” has vastly complicated the lives of American eaters without doing anything for our health, except possibly to make it worse. Nutritionism arose to deal with a genuine problem--the fact that the modern American diet is responsible for an epidemic of chronic diseases, from obesity and type II diabetes to heart disease and many cancers--but it has obscured the real roots of that problem and stood in the way of a solution. That solution involves putting the focus back on foods and food chains, for it turns out our personal health cannot be divorced from the health of the soil, plants, and animals that make up the food chains in which we take part. In this talk, Pollan explores what the industrialization of food and agriculture has meant for our health and happiness as eaters, and looks at the growing national movement to renovate the food system.

  The Center for the Humanities in partnership with the Wisconsin Alumni ResearchFoundation; the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies; the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE); the Wisconsin Initiative for Science Literacy; the Bradshaw-Knight Foundation; UW-Madison Libraries; the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences; the Distinguished Lecture Series; UW-Madison Athletics; and the Research, Education, Action and Policy on Food Group (REAP) is pleased to announce a public lecture by Michael Pollan. This event is free and open to the public.

  Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food has been chosen as the first book in the Go Big Read common book program.

  Read one of Pollan's recent articles about the future of food in America: New York Times Magazine: The Food Issue: An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief

• For the past twenty years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: food, agriculture, gardens, drugs, and architecture. Pollan is the author, most recently, of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. His previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post. It also won the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, the James Beard Award for best food writing, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Pollan's previous book, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, was also a New York Times bestseller, received the Borders Original Voices Award for the best non-fiction work of 2001, and was recognized as a best book of the year by the American Booksellers Association and Amazon.com. He is also the author of A Place of My Own (1997) and Second Nature (1991). A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine since 1987, his writing has received numerous awards, including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003; the John Burroughs prize (for the best natural history essay in 1997); the QPB New Vision Award (for his first book, Second Nature); the 2000 Reuters-I.U.C.N. Global Award for Environmental Journalism for his reporting on genetically modified crops; and the 2003 Humane Society of the United States’ Genesis Award for his writing on animal agriculture. His essays have appeared in many anthologies, including Best American Essays (the 1990 and 2003 editions), Best American Science Writing (2004), and the Norton Book of Nature Writing. In addition to publishing regularly in the New York Times Magazine, his articles have appeared in Harper’s (where he served for many years as executive editor), Mother Jones, Gourmet, Vogue, Travel + Leisure, Gardens Illustrated, and House & Garden. In 2003, Pollan was appointed the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, and the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism. In addition to teaching, he lectures widely on food, agriculture, and gardening.

• Lorraine Daston
• Executive director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin
• The Passions of the Unnatural
• April 24, 2009 @ 7:30 pm
• Pyle Center
• This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.

• The unnatural comes in several forms: monsters that violate the order of natural species; catastrophes that capsize the order of ecological balance; marvels or miracles that break with the order of what happens always or most of the time. It is a striking fact that these versions of the unnatural also provoke distinctive emotional responses: horror, terror, and wonder, respectively. These are the emotions (or better, passions, in the original sense of the term as an extreme state that we suffer rather than merely feel) that register a breach of order -- and blur the boundary between the natural and the moral.

• Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany and Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her most recent book, co-authored with Peter Galison, is Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2008). Lorraine Daston will also participate in a History of Science brown bag discussion April 24th, 2009 at 12PM in the Memorial Union. Co-Sponsored by the UW-Madison History of Science Department and the Center for the Humanities 'What is Human?' Initiative

• Leo Bersani
• Professor Emeritus of French at the University of California, Berkeley
• Ardent Masturbation (Descartes, Freud, et al.)
• April 16, 2009 @ 7:30 pm
• Pyle Center
• This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.

• Foucault identified the beginning of the modern age in his history of Western notions of subjectivity with "the Cartesian moment," by which he meant the prioritizing of knowledge over "care of the self" or spirituality. What are the procedures of Cartesian self-knowledge? In what sense does Descartes initiate a type of introspection characteristic of what we have come to understand as self-analysis?

• Leo Bersani was for several years the Class of 1950 Professor of French at UC Berkeley. His books include The Freudian Body, The Culture of Redemption, Homos and, with Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio's Secrets and Forms of Being/Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity. Chicago University Press has recently published Intimacies, a work co-authored with Adam Phillips.

  Leo Bersani will participate in a brown bag, "Thinking Intimacies: A Faculty Roundtable with Leo Bersani" on Friday, April 17th, 12-1:30 in HC White 6191. Including UW Professors Jill Casid (Art History), Michael Jay McClure (Art), and James Klausen (Political Science).

• K. Anthony Appiah
• Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University
• Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
• April 6, 2009 @ 7:30 pm
• Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
• This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.

• In his acerbic lectures, Appiah explores some of the central ethical questions of our time. How is it possible to consider the world a moral community, for instance, when there is so much disagreement about the nature of morality? He offers answers that are grounded in a new ethics (Cosmopolitanism) which celebrates our common humanity, while at the same time offers a practical way to manage our differences. With wit, reason and humanity, he offers a new approach to living a moral life in the modern age -- where the competing claims of “a Clash of Civilizations” on one hand, and a groundless moral relativism on the other, can make such a project seem impossible.

• Kwame Anthony Appiah is our postmodern Socrates. He asks what it means to be African and African-American, but his answers immediately raise issues that encompass us all. His principal and abiding concern is how we individually construct ourselves in dialogue with social circumstance, both private and public, past and present. He has taught philosophy and African and African-American studies at Cambridge, Duke, Cornell, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton Universities. He is currently Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton (with a cross-appointment at the University Center for Human Values). Appiah's latest book, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Issues of Our Time), is a work of discourse on “clashing civilizations” that, according to Publisher's Weekly, “reclaims a tradition of creative exchange and imaginative engagement across lines of difference.” His early philosophical work dealt with probabilistic semantics and theories of meaning, but his more recent books have tackled philosophical problems of race and racism. The Ethics of Identity and In My Father's House are among his titles. This event is co-sponsored by the UW-Madison Distinguished Lecture Committee, the UW-Madison African Studies Program, the UW-Madison Human Rights Initiative, Global Studies, and with generous support from the Evjue Foundation.