On Monday, September 9 at 4:30 p.m. in Chancellor Green Rotunda, speakers at the 13th Annual Humanities Colloquium will discuss how tradition, critique, and imagination should interact in humanistic inquiry today.
In The Value of the Humanities, Helen Small tells us that “the work of the humanities is frequently descriptive, or appreciative, or imaginative, or provocative, or speculative, more than it is critical.” At the same time, recent debates in various disciplines suggest that this range is potentially threatened by the ubiquity of critique, practiced as a relentless hermeneutics of suspicion.
The Humanities Council welcomes the University community to gather for a wide-ranging conversation about these central issues in our research, teaching, and intellectual life more broadly.
This year’s panel features distinguished Princeton scholars whose work represents different approaches and historical periods. The panel will be introduced and moderated by Eric S. Gregory, Chair of the Humanities Council.
Speakers:
Anne A. Cheng
English; American Studies
“The Critical Exhaustion of WOC”
Jonathan Gold
Religion; South Asian Studies
“Criticism as an Expression of Sociocultural Mindfulness”
Daniel Heller-Roazen
Comparative Literature
“Imagination in a Forgotten Tradition”
Dan-el Padilla Peralta
Classics
“Criticism and the Rejection of Pious Antiquarianism”
