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.

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.

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.