Going Public: Reimagining the PhD

Ep. 20: Alexander Nehamas on ““Only in the Contemplation of Beauty Is Human Life Worth Living” (2005 Katz Distinguished Lecture)

This episode is part of a special series for 2023-2024 featuring some of our popular talks from our annual Katz Distinguished Lecture series. This month’s episode features Alexander Nehamas’s talk from 2005 titled “Only in the Contemplation of Beauty Is Human Life Worth Living.” Alexander Nehamas is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is a champion of aesthetic values and is committed to the view that the arts and humanities are an indispensable part of human life for all people. His books, including Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art published in 2007, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (1999), and Nietzsche: Life as Literature (1985), have been translated into nine languages. He is also a translator (into English) of Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus and he is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The 2023-2024 season of Going Public features select Katz Distinguished Lectures from our archive. Learn more about the lecture series and peruse the archive: https://simpsoncenter.org/katz-lectures.

Ep. 19: Robin D.G. Kelley on “When Africa Was ‘The Thing’: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times” (2010 Katz Distinguished Lecture)

This episode is part of a special series for 2023-2024 featuring some of our popular talks from the center’s annual Katz Distinguished Lecture series. This month’s episode features Robin D.G. Kelley’s talk from 2010 titled “When Africa Was ‘The Thing’: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times.” A pathbreaking scholar, prolific writer, and engaged intellectual, Robin D.G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times published in 2012, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009), and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002), as well as many co-edited books, including Our History Has Always Been Contraband, with Colin Kaepernick and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, published in 2023. Kelley also frequently writes for a wide range of publications, including The Nation, New York Times, Rolling Stone, Callaloo, and Social Text. The 2023-2024 season of Going Public features select Katz Distinguished Lectures from our archive. Learn more about the lecture series and peruse the archive: https://simpsoncenter.org/katz-lectures.

Ep. 18: Shu-Mei Shih on “From World History to World Art: Reflections on New Geographies of Feminist Art in Asia” (2012 Katz Distinguished Lecture)

Historians and literary scholars have struggled with the ideas of world history and world literature, but their efforts have largely run parallel with each other. Taking cue from discussions of world history and world literature, how might we conceive of world art and the place of Asian feminist art within it? What new geographies are possible when we consider Asian feminist art on the world scale? Shu-mei Shih explores these questions in her 2012 Katz Distinguished lecture. Her lecture is also the keynote address for New Geographies of Feminist Art: China, Asia, and the World, an international conference that reconsiders the practice, circulation, and cross-cultural significance of feminist art from Asia. Shih is Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages & Cultures, and Asian American Studies at University of California, Los Angeles, where she holds the Irving and Jean Stone Chair in Humanities. She is the author of Against Diaspora: Discourses on Sinophone Studies published in 2017, Keywords of Taiwan Theory 2019, and Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (2007). She is also the editor of a special issue of PMLA on “Comparative Racialization” (2008). She was awarded a Yu-Shan Scholar Prize from Taiwan’s Ministry of Education for 2022-2025. The 2023-2024 season of Going Public features select Katz Distinguished Lectures from our archive. Learn more about the lecture series and peruse the archive: https://simpsoncenter.org/katz-lectures.

Ep. 17: Catherine Cole on “Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice in South Africa” (2022 Katz Distinguished Lecture)

In this special edition of Going Public: Reimagining the PhD, Danny Hoffman (Jackson School of International Studies) interviews Catherine Cole, 2022 Katz Distinguished Lecture. Danny is joined by Nikki Yeboah, playwright and assistant professor in University of Washington’s School of Drama. They discuss the topic of her lecture, which examines how unresolved pasts tend to return. In the aftermath of state-perpetrated injustice, a façade of peace can suddenly give way. In such circumstances, the voices and visions of artists can help us see what otherwise evades perception. Focusing on contemporary performance in post-apartheid South Africa, this lecture will explore how unresolved racialized histories of state-perpetrated violence create conditions of possibility and impossibility for performance artists, choreographers, and theater makers. Cole will be presenting from her recent book, Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice, which brings the most social of art forms—live performance—together with questions about how societies change in the wake of state perpetrated atrocities. Catherine Cole is Professor of Dance and English at the University of Washington where she served as Divisional Dean of the Arts from 2016-2022. She is an internationally renowned scholar of African performance studies. As a scholar, teacher, and artist, she brings together themes of independence and interdependence, performance in Africa and in the diaspora, disability and movement, post-apartheid art, and postcolonial history. She is the author of Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice published in 2020, and choreographer and performer of dance theatre pieces, including Just Duet, Still Point, and Five Foot Feat. The 2023-2024 season of Going Public features select Katz Distinguished Lectures from our archive. Learn more about the lecture series and peruse the archive: https://simpsoncenter.org/katz-lectures

Ep. 16: Ato Quayson on “Disputatiousness and Unruly Affective Economies: From the Greeks to Chinua Achebe” (2022 Katz Distinguished Lecture)

In this special edition of Going Public: Reimagining the PhD, Danny Hoffman (Jackson School of International Studies) interviews Ato Quayson, 2022 Katz Distinguished Lecture. They discuss the topic of his lecture, which asks, what is the place of disputatiousness in the history of tragic form and how might it help us to further understand tragedy from the Greeks to African literature? The Greeks give us great examples of disputatiousness: Oedipus vs. Tiresias, Clytemnestra vs. Agamemnon, Medea vs. Jason, Antigone vs. Creon. These disagreements were in response to dramatic historical changes that masked themselves as personal differences. This lecture will offer a theory of African and postcolonial tragedy, drawing on historical disputatiousness and its relationship to fraught individual affective economies. Examples will be drawn from different literary traditions and cultures but will specifically focus on the rural novels of Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God). Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Chair of the Department of English at Stanford. He is the author of Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature published in 2021, and Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism (2014). He is editor of several books, including The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel (2015), and he is host of the YouTube series Critic.Reading.Writing. Professor Quayson is an elected member of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, and the British Academy. The 2023-2024 season of Going Public features select Katz Distinguished Lectures from our archive. Learn more about the lecture series and peruse the archive: https://simpsoncenter.org/katz-lectures.