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Conversation in the Critical Humanities

In 2025, the Kaplan Conversation in the Critical Humanities will invite scholars to address timely topics of wide interest or urgency from a humanistic perspective.

Winter 2025

SOLIDARITY AND CIVIL RIGHTS: RACE, CASTE, AND NONVIOLENCE - A CONVERSATION WITH NICO SLATE  
January 22, 2025 (Wed.)
4:00 - 5:30 pm
Harris Hall #108

Nico Slate, Daniel Immerwahr, and Ivy WilsonNico Slate, Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon, will be in conversation with Daniel Immerwahr (Professor of History) and Ivy Wilson (Associate Professor of English and Director, Black Arts Consortium).

For two hundred years, social reformers in the United States and India have compared race and caste. The majority of these reformers ignored what was lost in translating complex identities and hierarchies into the words “race” and “caste” and then again translating between these words. While exploring the limitations of such a double translation, this talk will explore how race/caste analogies were used to build intersectional solidarities that aimed to bridge movements against white supremacy, caste oppression, and other forms of injustice. Key figures will include W.E.B. Du Bois, B.R. Ambedkar, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Co-presented by the Kaplan Humanities Institute and the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies.

 

SPRING 2025

NICOLE FLEETWOOD - MARKING TIME: ART IN THE AGE OF MASS INCARCERATION
Thursday, April 17, 2025
5:30-7:00 pm
Harris Hall #108
Keynote of the 2025 Public Humanities Symposium

Nicole Fleetwood (James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU) will be in conversation with Marquis Bey (Professor of Black Studies, Northwestern). This public lecture by Professor Fleetwood is the keynote of the Kaplan Humanities Institute's two-day Public Humanities Symposium. Fleetwood is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020) and the curator of a MoMA PS1 exhibition of the same name. Both Fleetwood’s book and exhibition were named as a best book and a best show of the year, respectively, by the New York Times, The National Book Foundation, Smithsonian, and The New Yorker. Fleetwood is a recipient of a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship grant and many other awards and accolades besides.