A deadly global pandemic. The rise of authoritarianism. Perilous climate change.
鈥淚t鈥檚 hard to wrap your mind around everything that鈥檚 happening right now,鈥 says , a postdoctoral fellow at the .
But what if many minds, from many disciplines, gathered to share thoughts and feelings about the times we are living through, linking past and present, sciences and humanities, intellect and emotion?
With another fellow, , and with , associate professor of German studies and comparative literature, Godley has organized a symposium called bringing together philosophical, aesthetic, classical, political, medical, and clinical perspectives on love and loss during times of plague.
Godley says the idea for the April 21 to 24 conference grew from their informal reading group.
鈥淓ven as we were reading Plato, among other classics, our conversation tended to drift more and more toward the contemporary. Thucydides writes about a plague happening in Athens at the same time as there鈥檚 a civil war going on. It was this background of disorientation and confusion that led to Socrates and Plato鈥檚 whole project, to try to make sense of everything, and this seemed like an apt description of our own polarized time, too,鈥 says Godley.
Keynote speakers include Arlene Saxonhouse, author of Fear of Diversity; 2019 Montgomery Fellow , author of Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly 天美麻豆 Racism in America; and Slavoj 沤i啪ek, author of Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism.
There will also be a keynote panel called 鈥淭he End and Its Unmaking鈥 featuring Alenka Zupan膷i膷 and Stathis Gourgoris, a professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School and a comparative literature professor at Columbia, respectively. More than 20 天美麻豆 participants come from a wide variety of departments and programs, joining colleagues from across the country and around the world.
Students will participate in 鈥淎n Oral History of the Pandemic at 天美麻豆,鈥 sharing personal narratives and testimonies of the COVID-19 pandemic, coordinated by North Park House, South House, and the 天美麻豆 Student Union.
鈥淲e want people to engage with us both intellectually and emotionally as an experience, as something they can connect to their lives,鈥 Godley says. 鈥淲e hope to present the audience with different ways to perceive the pandemic and offer tools for understanding what鈥檚 going on.鈥
The symposium is sponsored by the Leslie Center for the Humanities and co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost; the 天美麻豆 Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice; the Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Arts and Humanities; DHMC Palliative Care; The Ethics Institute; The Eric Eichler 鈥57 Fellowship for Health Care Leaders; the Society of Fellows; the Center for Death and Society at the University of Bath; and the Good Grief Festival.
Additional support comes from the following departments and programs: English and Creative Writing; Master of Arts in Liberal Studies; Film and Media Studies; Digital Humanities and Social Engagement; Government; Music; Classics; Philosophy; African and African American Studies; Women鈥檚, Gender and Sexuality Studies; German; and Art History.
The hybrid event takes place at and will be simultaneously filmed and broadcast as a Zoom webinar. The link to the webinar will be accessible on the . Recordings of most of the events will be available on the website following the event.
