Part IV: Public Humanities
This multi-year series responds to current challenges to rational public debate. Following Part III of the series in 2021-2022 entitled “Transforming Institutions,” Part II in 2020-2021 on “Data & Democracy,” and finally Part I in 2019-2020 “Race and the Promise of Participation,” the 2022-2023 speakers series focuses on examples of public humanities. From African American heritage and preservation and questions about how philosophy can engage the public, to a discussion of the role of environmental humanities, this series focuses on the contributions of the humanities to public discourse.
SPEAKERS
Spring 2023
Nicholas Allen (University of Georgia, Department of English and Willson Center for Humanities and Art)
“Public Humanities as Environmental Humanities”
5:00 p.m. Thursday, January 26, 2023 – Smathers Libraries 100
The public and the environmental humanities both have rich histories of engaged thinking about the utility and justice of the intellectual and material structures that surround us, and which we sometimes otherwise mistake to be natural. Innovative work is emerging already to connect public and environmental humanities practices in smaller-scaled projects that are planetary in aspiration, which has implications for how we consider our humanities teaching, research, and engagement more broadly. Our conversation will be an opportunity to share and learn about how such projects can be designed and built. It will also consider how the public and the environmental humanities together can prepare the ground, water, and atmosphere for modes of thinking that give shape to the answers we need to questions of social and environmental justice, climate catastrophe, and our sense of self and community in a devastated world.
Nicholas Allen is the director of the Willson Center and holds a Professorship in Humanities in the department of English at UGA. He has published several books on Ireland and its literature, has been the Burns Visiting Scholar at Boston College, and has received many grants and awards, including from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Irish Research Council.
Past Events
Fall 2022
Brent Leggs (Executive Director, African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and University of Pennsylvania)
“Preserving Galaxy of Black Landmarks is an Act of Racial Justice”
2:00 p.m. Friday, September 23, 2022 – Smathers Libraries 100
Without a thorough reckoning with the complex and difficult history of our country, especially when it comes to race, we will not be able to overcome intolerance, injustice, and inequality. That is why, in November 2017, the National Trust for Historic Preservation launched its African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, a $25 million campaign to reconstruct a true national identity that reflects America’s diversity. Preserving this tapestry of America’s shared culture, pride and heritage is an act of racial justice and should be viewed as a civil right.
Evening Event: “Preserving African American Communities and Landmarks: A Conversation with Brent Leggs (African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund) and Community Leaders of African American Neighborhoods and Sites”
6:00 p.m. Friday, September 23, 2022 – Cotton Club Museum, 837 SE 7th Ave
This event is organized in collaboration with the Cotton Club Museum and Cultural Center.
Brent Leggs is the founding executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund – a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and largest preservation campaign in U.S. History on behalf of historic African American places. Through the Action Fund, he leads a broad community of leaders and activists in honor of the clarion that preserving African American cultural sites is fundamental to understanding the American story. Leggs is a Harvard University Loeb Fellow, author of Preserving African American Historic Places, and the 2018 recipient of the Robert G. Stanton National Preservation Award. His efforts to protect the A.G. Gaston Motel, Madam C.J. Walker estate, John and Alice Coltrane and Nina Simone residences, and Joe Frazier’s Gym is exemplary of his successful campaigns to preserve many cultural monuments throughout the U.S. Leggs is also an Adjunct Associate Professor and Senior Advisor to the Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design.
- Per UF policy, masks are recommended for those not fully vaccinated. The Cotton Club Museum and Cultural Center requires masks in the building except when eating or drinking.
Barry Lam (University of California, Riverside, Department of Philosophy)
“Discretion and the Law: Rules and Those Who Ignore Them”
4:00 p.m. Thursday, October 20, 2022 – Smathers Libraries 100
Over the course of a year in 2019 and again in 2022, Dr. Barry Lam embedded himself with police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges looking for the philosophical issues that arise from the day-to-day administration of criminal justice. Rather than find people concerned with large historical and structural issues that those of us in the humanities study, he found people concerned with their own use of discretionary power in reaction to those issues. Police, prosecutors, and judges have wide powers to ignore the laws that we task them with enforcing, and they often do, to the surprise, satisfaction, and sometimes outrage of their communities. This talk discusses the use of discretionary power and the question it raises about whether justice must sometimes be undemocratic.
Barry Lam received his PhD in Philosophy from Princeton University and did his early career research in epistemology and in the philosophy of language. In recent years, he has turned to philosophy that is connected to moral, political, or public policy issues. In addition to publishing in peer-reviewed journals directed toward other academics, he disseminates his thinking about these issues in narrative audio form for a wider audience. He produces and hosts Hi-Phi Nation, a show about philosophy that turns stories into ideas. He also started work in philanthropy as Associate Director of the Marc Sanders Foundation.
All events are free and open to the public.
UF Series Funders and Co-Sponsors:
Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment); African American Studies Program; Bob Graham Center for Public Service; Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship; Cotton Club Museum and Cultural Center; Department of History; Department of Philosophy; Department of Political Science; Department of Urban and Regional Planning; the Rothman Family Chair in the Humanities (Jack Davis); the UF College of Journalism and Communications’ Fund for Environmental Journalism; and UF Research.
For information on past speaker series, click here.