Nussbaum to Deliver Jefferson Lecture Monday
Editor's note, May 2, 2017: Video of the lecture is available here.
Martha C. Nussbaum will deliver the 2017 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on Monday, May 1, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. Her talk, “Powerlessness and the Politics of Blame,” will begin at 7:30 p.m. ET and can be viewed by livestream at www.facebook.com/nehgov. (Viewers do not need a Facebook account.) The free, public event is sold out—but it may still be possible to attend. Information on the standby line and obtaining unclaimed tickets can be found here.
In her speech, Nussbaum, the University of Chicago’s Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, will draw on her years of work on the role of emotion in politics to explore the emotional dynamics at play in American and other societies today—including the ways in which uncertainty leads to the blaming of outsider groups.
The lecture, established by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1972, is the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. Previous speakers include jurist and law professor Paul Freund, writer Saul Bellow, historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., literary critic Helen Vendler, and filmmaker Martin Scorsese. Leon Kass, the University of Chicago’s Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus of Social Thought and in the College, was selected in 2009.
Engage or follow the Jefferson Lecture social conversation: #jefflec17