Harvard University English Professor Elaine Scarry will present two upcoming lectures at Linfield College.
Scarry will present “Beauty and Social Justice” on Monday, March 17, at 4:30 p.m. in 219 T.J. Day Hall, as well as “The Floor of the World” on Tuesday, March 18, at 7:30 p.m. in the Austin Reading Room at Nicholson Library.
During the first evening’s lecture, Scarry, the author of “On Beauty and Being Just,” will discuss the call to justice in beautiful objects. For the second lecture, Scarry will draw on her new book “Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom,” and argue for the impossibility of democracy in a nuclear state.
Scarry, the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value at Harvard, is the author of numerous books. Drawing on literature, visual arts, philosophy and politics, her works pursue concerns with beauty, justice, suffering and consent. She received the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2000 for her book “Dreaming by the Book,” and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2013. Other books include The Body in Pain (1985), Resisting Representation (1994) and Thinking in an Emergency (2011). She holds a bachelor’s degree from Chatham College and a master’s and Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut.
The lectures are free and open to the public. They are co-sponsored by the Ken and Donna Ericksen Endowed English Department Fund, the Program for Liberal Arts and Civic Engagement (PLACE) and the Linfield College Department of English. Kenneth Ericksen, professor emeritus of English at Linfield, created the endowment in memory of his wife, Donna, a Linfield alumna, who taught reading, writing and English in the Hillsboro School District for 25 years. The endowment allows the English Department to bring distinguished literary scholars to campus for several days to work with faculty and students and to present a public lecture.
For more information, contact Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, Linfield assistant professor of English, at dpollac@linfield.edu or 503-883-2484.
