Related: The Future of the Humanities Project
Over the course of the 2023-2024 academic year, the Future of the Humanities Project is sponsoring a series of lectures on cultural encounters in collaboration with the Georgetown Humanities Initiative and Blackfriars Hall, Oxford.
In a world increasingly divided along national, religious, and cultural lines, Pope Francis has called for a "culture of encounter" that promotes communication and builds trust while acknowledging the inevitability of conflict. Cultural encounters that entail the recognition of others in their otherness are a contemporary imperative with a rich thematic history in literature and the humanities. This series will bring leading scholars together, across disciplines, to explore themes of encounter both in classic literary works and in contemporary cultural debates. The hour-long virtual events will include a Q&A with the audience. Following the launch event, all subsequent events will take place at 11:00 a.m. ET/4:00 p.m. UK.
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The Betrothed (1827) is Alessandro Manzoni’s nineteenth-century Italian classic about star-crossed lovers and a cowardly priest. It was re-translated into English in 2022, resulting in new…
James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920) is a book filled with descriptions of the feeling of encounters. “Brief encounters” form the subject of a titillating joke early on, and the entire day of June 16, 1904…
Artists in different places often hold contrasting views on the meanings of Shakespeare’s plays and on Shakespeare’s stature in modern culture. What they do have in common is their effort to plant new…
In his third encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis proposes that “an innate tension exists between globalization and localization.” In his great short story "The Dead" (1914), James Joyce…
The cultural encounter addressed in this talk by Molly Clark is between the ancient and the medieval, the classical and the vernacular, specifically, the style of the Roman playwright Seneca and the…
In this lecture, Robert S. Miola argued that Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1623) reflects local and specific contemporary stereotypes about the barbarous Scots and the civilizing English just as it…
