Audio Archive

Use-Value and Exchange-Value … and Value

Speaker: Andrew Kliman, Pace University
Date: 10/07/2020
 

Andrew Kliman, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Pace University, is the author of Reclaiming Marx’s “Capital”: A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency (2006) and The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession (2011). His research on value theory, economic crisis theory, and other topics has appeared in numerous journals and book collections. He works with the Marxist-Humanist Initiative and is cohost (with Brendan Cooney) of Radio Free Humanity: The Marxist-Humanist Podcast, which appears biweekly.

Antisemitism in the Ancient Mediterranean? Early Christianity and Anti-Judaism

Speakers: Ben Dunning, Jörg Frey, Dale Martin Wayne Meeks, Hindy Najman
Date: 04/04/2013

In fulfilling its mission to examine the whole history of Antisemitism, the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism hosts a panel discussion examining the philosophical and social origins of Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity.

Michael Pollan ‘Raw’: A Conversation with Michael Pollan and Jack Hitt about cooking, eating, and writing

Speaker: Michael Pollan
Date: 03/30/2013

Michael Pollan, critically acclaimed author and journalist, sits down with writer Jack Hitt to discuss the former’s recent work and other topics related to food and cooking.

How the Mind Models the World: New Ideas from MRI Findings

Speaker:  Dr. Andrew Gerber
Date: 03/05/2013

Dr.Andrew Gerber, Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University, delivers a lecture on the use of MRI in the study of psychopathology and psychotherapy.

The Psychobiology of Parenting and Attachment

Speakers: Linda Mayes, Helena Rutherford
Date: 02/19/2013

Linda Mayes and Helena Rutherford, of the Child Study Center at Yale University, deliver a lecture on the mechanisms of influence between children and parents in the process of development,especially with regard to psychoanalysis.

Combat Trauma and the Tragic Stage: Ancient Drama and Modern Catharsis

Speaker: Peter Meineck
Date: 11/28/2012

In addition to texts by the major Greek dramatists, Prof. Meineck considers non-dramatic works from the history and philosophy of the period, as well as the history of Athenian stagecraft, as part of a culture for which the scars of war were a factor of everyday life.Prof. Meineck is a Clinical Associate Professor of Classics at New York University as well as the founder and artist director of the Aquila Theatre Company, which brings Ancient and contemporary plays to the stage in a manner designed to appeal to the widest audience possible. He has translated works by Sophocles, Aristophanes, Aeschylus and others, and is the recipient of numerous awards for his translations and teaching.

Sappho, Lincoln, and the Senate: Picturing Nineteenth-Century Female Desire

Speaker: Simon Goldhill
Date: 11/27/2012

Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek Literature and Culture and Fellow in Classics at King’s College, Cambridge, delivers a lecture on depictions of Sappho in the nineteenth century America, especially with regard to the female artist in the period.

Carrying Off the Colosseum: British Architectural Encounters with Rome in the 1770s

Speaker: Frank Salmon
Date: 11/08/2012

Dr. Frank Salmon, Lecturer in the History of Art and Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, delivers a lecture on the connections between the Classical architecture of antiquity and British architectural production in the eighteenth century.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined

Speaker: Steven Pinker
Date: 11/01/2012

Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, delivers a lecture on the phenomenon of statistic decline in violence throughout human history.

Romancing Spinoza

Speaker: Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Date: 10/02/2012

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, a novelist, biographer, and professor of philosophy, delivers the Franke Lecture in the Fall of 2012 on the influences of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza upon literature and the enlightenment. Goldstein challenges a cultural portrait of Spinoza as distant from aesthetic concerns, and meditates upon Spinoza’s imprint upon writers including Melville, Goethe, George Eliot, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Heine. Granted a prestigious “genius award” by the MacArthur Foundation, Goldstein is the author of several acclaimed philosophically-minded novels, has held multiple prestigious teaching appointments at universities including Columbia and Rutgers, and has written biographies of Kurt Godel and Spinoza.

“Slamlet” featuring Kate Tempest and Yale’s Teeth Slam Poets

Speaker: Kate Tempest
Date: 04/09/2012

Teeth Slam Poets, a spoken word poetry team at Yale University, present an evening of poems inspired by the works of William Shakespeare. The event features a guest performance by Kate Tempest, a London based spoken word artist. “Slamet” was presented as part of Shakespeare at Yale, a semester of events celebrating Shakespeare’s history and continued influence on contemporary culture. Ms. Tempest has performed extensively in Europe and the United States, and her work has received wide critical praise.

Adapted to a Symbolic Niche: How Less became more in Human Evolution

Speaker: Terrence William Deacon
Date: 03/27/2012

Terrence W. Deacon delivers a lecture on the neuroscience and development of the human capacity for language and musical perception. Prof. Deacon is the Chair of the Anthropology Department at the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests lie in the field of brain development and evolution, the origins of language, and bio-cultural evolution. Many of these interests are found in his book, The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain (1997). His lecture presented here, on the formation of human language and symbolic thought, is a part of the Shulman Lectures in Science and the Humanities delivered at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University.

For the Record: A Conversation Reflecting on Thirty Years of the Whitney Humanities Center

Speakers: Peter Brooks, Kai Erikson, Geoffrey Hartman, Robert Shulman
Date: 02/28/2012

A conversation reflecting on thirty years of Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center with Peter Brooks, Founding Director, and Founding Fellows Kai Erikson, Geoffrey Hartman, and Robert Shulman is held as part of the Whitney’s 30th Anniversary celebration. In 1981, the Whitney Humanities Center began at Yale University under the new university presidency of A. Bartlett Giamatti. For this celebration of thirty year’s growth and activity at Yale, the WHC’s founding director and three of its founding fellows return to discuss and offer reflections on their experience both in the University at large and their place at the WHC within it, especially with regard to the role of the humanities in relation to the sciences in the undergraduate experience at Yale. Peter Brooks, Founding Director, is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University and Andrew W. Mellon Scholar in the department of Comparative Literature and the Center for Human Values at Princeton. Kai Erikson is the William R. Kenen Jr. Professor Emeritus of Sociology and American Studies at Yale. Geoffrey Hartman is Sterling Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scholar of English and Comparative Literature at Yale, and Robert Shulman is Professor Emeritus of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and Senior Research Scientist in Diagnostic Radiology.

The Alignment and Synchronization of Brain States Through Music

Speaker: Jamshed Bahrucha
Date: 02/21/2012

In this lecture, cognitive neuroscientist Jamshed Bharucha discusses the ways that music creates emotion and how these emotions work within human interactions and relationships. Professor Bharucha, who is also a classically trained violinist, has written extensively on the cognitive and neural underpinnings of music and has been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health for his work. He began his academic career at Dartmouth College, where he was the John Wentworth Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences. He also served as Associate Dean, Deputy Provost, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; a signature accomplishment of his administrative work at Dartmouth was the creation of the nation’s first brain-imaging facility for the study of cognitive neuroscience outside a clinical setting. In July of 2011 he was named President of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Galileo, Mathematics, and the Arts

Speaker: Mark A. Peterson
Date: 01/18/2012

Mark A. Peterson discusses Galileo’s study of mathematics in relation to the arts. Prof. Peterson argues that Galileo the mathematician, steeped in the art and literature of his day, needs to be better known, separate from his work as an astronomer. Dr. Peterson is Chair of Physics and Professor of both Mathematics and Physics at Mount Holyoke College. His research often explores the intersection of science and the humanities, history of science, as well as biophysical research. Professor Peterson has published on such varied topics as computer science, Galileo, models of microhydrodynamics in biophysical settings, and others.

A Translator’s Confession

Speaker: Jonathan Galassi
Date: 11/09/2011

Jonathan Galassi, President and Publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, delivers the Finzi-Contini Lecture in the Fall of 2011 on his experiences as a translator of Italian poetry into English. Focusing on his translations of Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi, Galassi shares his personal experiences as what he calls an “impassioned amateur” engaging in the words, poems, and literary output of others and writing in a language not one’s own. In addition to his work as a publisher and translator, Galassi is a poet in his own right, having published two collections of his own poems. He was also poetry editor for The Paris Review for ten years and an honorary chairman of the Academy of American Poets.

Public Life and Festivals in Eighteenth-Century Venice

Speaker: William Barcham
Date: 11/03/2011

Prof. William Barcham, Emeritus of the Fashion Institute of Technology, delivers a lecture on the production of paintings of public festivals and other civic events in Venice in the eighteenth century. Delivered as a part of the lecture series accompanying the Franke Seminar entitles, Art and Music in Venice, Prof. Barcham’s lecture treats the genre of painting social and civic events in the city of Venice, such as Carnivale, religious Feast Day celebrations, and other civic rituals. View painters, such as Canaletto and Francesco Guardi, painted numerous depictions of these distinctively Venetian festivities for purposes of sale and export and the fashioning of Venetian identity. Prof. Barcham is a specialist in Venetian art and culture and has published numerous works on Canaletto, Giambattista Tiepolo, Federico Cornaro, and the image of the Man of Sorrows in the later Middle Ages.

Painting Music in Renaissance Venice

Speaker: David Rosand
Date: 10/13/2011

Prof. David Rosand, Emeritus of Columbia University, delivers a lecture on representations of music and music making by Venetian painters in the Renaissance. As a guest speaker giving a public lecture to accompany the Franke Seminar on Art and Music in Venice in the Fall of 2011, Prof. Rosand’s presentation examines the depictions of music in Venetian Renaissance painting, including personifications of music itself, musicians, concerts, and instruments in the art of Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and their circle. Prof. Rosand also considers the metaphorical meaning of music as a signifier of harmony and order, and how those values were transferred to the image of Venice itself and Venetian culture. Prof. Rosand is the Meyer Schapiro Professor emeritus of Art History at Columbia University and has published numerous books on Venetian painting in the Renaissance.

Music and Architecture in Renaissance Venice

Speaker: Deborah Howard
Date: 09/15/2011

Prof. Howard’s lecture considers the acoustical needs of various composers and performers in the architectural spaces of Renaissance Venice. Her important research explores the performance possibilities in the various churches and concert venues of Venice and the way in which music written for those spaces may have sounded to different audiences. Prof. Howard is Professor of Architectural History in the Faculty of Architecture and History of Art and a Fellow of St. John”s College, Cambridge. She has published numerous books on the art and architecture of Venice and the Veneto.

The Power of Hospitality

Speaker: Danny Meyer
Date: 04/18/2011

Danny Meyer discusses the role and concept of hospitality in the context of the restaurant industry, and how hospitality contributes to an excellent dining experience and thus to a successful restaurant business. Mr. Meyer is the CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group, which includes Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park, Tabla, Blue Smoke, Jazz Standard, Shake Shack, The Modern, the cafes at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, Maialino, as well as Union Square Events, the company’s catering and events business, and Hospitality Quotient, a learning business empowering companies to transform their business through the power of hospitality. Mr. Meyer, his restaurants, and chefs have earned an unprecedented twenty-one James Beard Awards. Mr. Meyer coauthored the Union Square Cafe Cookbook (1994) and Second Helpings from Union Square Cafe (2001) with his partner, Chef Michael Romano. His first business book, Setting the Table (2006), was named a bestseller by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek. An active national leader in the fight against hunger, Mr. Meyer has long served on the boards of Share Our Strength and City Harvest. He is equally active in civic affairs, serving on the executive committees of NYC & Co, Union Square Partnership, and the Madison Square Park Conservancy.

Naming Nature: A Conversation on the Nature, Use and Limitations of Biological Taxonomies

Speakers: Michael Donoghue, Jacque Gauthier, James Prosek, Richard Prum, Kevin de Queiroz, Zoltan Szabo
Date: 04/15/2011

A multi-disciplinary panel of evolutionary biologists, joined by a philosopher and an artist, discuss how and why we order and describe the natural world the way that we do now and possible alternatives. The featured speakers from Yale are Michael Donoghue, the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Jacques Gauthier, professor of geology and geophysics and curator of vertebrate paleontology and vertebrate zoology at the Peabody Museum; Richard Prum, the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; and Zoltan Szabo, professor of philosophy. Also taking part in the discussion are Kevin de Queiroz, curator and research zoologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, and artist, writer and naturalist James Prosek.

Sublime Science in the Late Enlightenment: Adam Walker and the Eidouranion

Speaker: Jan Golinski
Date: 04/07/2011

Prof. Golinski discusses the links between public science and aesthetics at the turn of the 19th century by focusing on inventor Adam Walker’s device for projecting astronomical effects on a screen. Called the Eidouranion, this early pre-cinema, with its mix of music and visual effects, made Walker one of the most successful scientific lecturers of his day, in part because of his explicit invocation of the sublime.

Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza

Speakers: Adina Hoffman, Peter Cole
Date: 04/04/2011

In this lecture, writers Adina Hoffamn and Peter Cole discuss the recovery of a cache of Hebrew manuscripts from a Cairo geniza (repository for sacred text), whose discovery and analysis have shed light on 900 years of Jewish life. NEA, NEH, Guggenheim and McArthur award-winning poet and translator, Peter Cole was the Franke Visiting Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center in 2006. Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, a biography of Taha Muhammad Ali, from Yale University Press. Her essays and literary criticism have appeared in the Nation, the TLS, the Raritan, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, New York Newsday, World Literature Today, and on the World Service of the BBC. Ms. Hoffman was the Franke Visiting Fellow in 2008. Together Ms. Hoffman and Mr. Cole are the founders and editors of Ibis Editions—a small press that publishes the literature of the Levant.

Can a Novelist Write Philosophically? Panel Discussion

Speakers: Michael Cunningham, Harry Frankfurt, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Amy Hungerford
Date: 03/25/2011

In this discussion, Rebecca Goldstein, Harry Frankfurt, and Michael Cunningham discuss the ways in which novelists do and do not write philosophically. The panel is chaired by Amy Hungerford. The featured speakers are novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, professor of philosophy Harry Frankfurt, novelist and professor of English Michael Cunningham, and professor of English Amy Hungerford.

The Ancient Quarrel: Philosophy and Literature, Part Two

Speaker: Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Date: 03/24/2011

In the second of her two Tanner lectures, Rebecca Goldstein discusses the overlap and conflict between philosophy and the literary arts, and whether novels can be philosophically justified. Ms. Goldstein’s career bridges the divides between the humanities, the arts, and the sciences. Equally comfortable discussing physics or fiction, she is also an important voice in the current active debates between religion and science. A Koret International Book Award winner, a multiple time National Jewish Book Award winner, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Whiting Foundation Writer’s Award winner, in 2008 she was designated Humanist Laureate by the International Academy of Humanism and was named Humanist of the Year 2011 by the American Humanist Association. Her books include Finding Spinoza, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Incompleteness, Mazel, and The Mind Body Problem.

The Ancient Quarrel: Philosophy and Literature, Part One

Speaker: Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Date: 03/23/2011

In the first of her two Tanner lectures, Rebecca Goldstein discusses the overlap and conflict between philosophy and the literary arts, and whether novels can be philosophically justified. Ms. Goldstein’s career bridges the divides between the humanities, the arts, and the sciences. Equally comfortable discussing physics or fiction, she is also an important voice in the current active debates between religion and science. A Koret International Book Award winner, a multiple time National Jewish Book Award winner, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Whiting Foundation Writer’s Award winner, in 2008 she was designated Humanist Laureate by the International Academy of Humanism and was named Humanist of the Year 2011 by the American Humanist Association. Her books include Finding Spinoza, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Incompleteness, Mazel, and The Mind Body Problem.

Art, Aesthetics, and Evolution

Speaker: Noel Carroll
Date: 03/03/2011

Noel Carroll discusses art as socio-emotional contagion: how the emotional arousal brought about by the arts provides important forms of social and emotional education that justify the social costs of the arts over the course of human history. Mr. Carroll is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests include aesthetic theory; philosophy of film, literature, and the visual arts; social and cultural theory; philosophy of history; ethics; philosophy of the emotions; and history of early modern philosophy. Mr. Carroll has published more than fifteen books, most recently, Art in Three Dimensions (2010) and On Criticism (2009). He has also written extensively as a journalist and is the author of five documentaries.

Inscribing Food/Talking Life: New Orleans Past

Speaker: Susan Tucker
Date: 03/02/2011

Susan Tucker, Curator of Books and Records at the Newcomb Center for Research on Women at Tulane University, gives the third Franke lecture in 2011 series, “History of Food and Cuisine.” Her talk is entitled “Inscribing Food/Talking Life: New Orleans Past.” Ms. Tucker is the author of Telling Memories Among Southern Women (1988); coeditor of The Scrapbook in American Life (2005), and editor of New Orleans Cuisine: Fourteen Signature Dishes and Their Histories (2009). More recently, Ms. Tucker is exploring the various forms in which family memories are kept, including the inscription of recipes and other food lore.

Sexual Selection and the Brain: An Origin of Evolutionary Aesthetics

Speaker: Michael Ryan
Date: 02/24/2011

In this lecture, Michael Ryan discusses the relationship between animal aesthetic preferences, sexual selection, and evolutionary biology. Dr. Ryan is the Clark Hubbs Professor of Zoology at the University of Texas at Austin. His research involves animal behavior, focusing on mechanisms of communication involved in mate attraction and corollary evolutionary consequences.

Paleolithic Formalism and the Emergence of Music

Speaker: Gary Tomlinson
Date: 02/03/2011

Gary Tomlinson discusses the complex co-evolution of human music making in relation to language, technology, and cognitive and imaginative development. Professor Tomlinson is a musicologist and cultural theorist known for his interdisciplinary breadth. His teaching, lecturing, and scholarship have ranged across a diverse set of interests, including the history of opera, early-modern European musical thought and practice, the musical cultures of indigenous American societies, jazz and popular music, and the philosophy of history and critical theory. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur “genius” award.

Banquets and Politics in China

Speaker: Joanna Waley-Cohen
Date: 01/31/2011

Joanna Waley-Cohen delivers the first Franke lecture in the 2011 series, “History of Food and Cuisine.” Her talk is titled “Banquets and Politics in China.” Ms. Waley-Cohen is currently chair of the History Department at NYU, where she has taught the history of China since 1992. Ms. Waley-Cohen has published many books and articles on Chinese law, politics, foreign relations, and culinary culture, and is currently working on two projects: a culinary history of early modern China, focused on consumption, leisure, cooking, and imperial dining practices; and an account of daily life in China around 1800.

A Conversation

Speakers: William Bailey, Mark Strand
Date: 11/02/2010

The Whitney Humanities Center presents William Bailey and Mark Strand in conversation. The artist and the poet joined in discussion to celebrate the opening of the exhibition “William Bailey Works on Paper: Temperas, Drawings, and Prints” at the Gallery at the Whitney. One of the country’s leading figurative artists, Mr. Bailey eschews narrative, nostalgia, and materiality in his work, which instead conveys an abstract engagement whether working in still life or from the human figure. In the words of Mr. Strand, who is also the author of a monograph on Mr. Bailey, the painter’s works represent “realizations of an idea.”

A Good Soup Holds History and Culture

Speaker: Claudia Roden
Date: 10/28/2010

Critically acclaimed food writer Claudia Roden, the 2010 Franke Visiting Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center, shares the ingredients of her successful career chronicling, memorializing, and reconstructing cultural worlds through cooking. Ms. Roden has a particular interest in the historical, social, and cultural background of cooking. In the words of the historian Simon Schama, “Claudia Roden is no more a simple cookbook writer than Marcel Proust was a biscuit baker. She is, rather, memorialist, historian, ethnographer, anthropologist, essayist, poet, who just happens to communicate through ta’am—taste.” Ms. Roden’s international accolades include six Glenfiddich Awards, the James Beard Award, induction into the Cookbook Hall of Fame, and many more.

Adonis, pioneer of modern Arabic poetry

Speaker: Adonis
Date: 10/26/2010

Adonis (born Ali Ahmad Said Esber) is a Syrian poet and essayist who led the modernist movement in Arabic poetry in the second half of the 20th century. He has written more than 20 books in his native Arabic, including the pioneering work An Introduction to Arab Poetics. He is visiting the US to celebrate his 80th birthday, and in this netcast, he and Khaled Mattawa read from Adonis: A Selection, published by Yale University Press in 2010 in the Cecile and Theodore Margellos World Republic of Letters Series.

Some Strange Region of the Universe: Material Things in the Gothic Cathedral

Speaker: Jacqueline Jung
Date: 04/13/2010

In her lecture, Jacqueline Jung talks about the material aspects of Gothic art and architecture and how they made the church precisely not a pure and abstract vision of heaven but a strange space partaking of both earthly and heavenly worlds. Jacqueline Jung specializes in the art and architecture of the medieval West, with an emphasis on the figural sculpture of Gothic Germany. Her teaching encompasses the history of medieval sculpture, images of death and apocalypse, art and ritual in the Middle Ages, Gothic cathedrals, medieval image-theory, medieval memory practices, and the interrelations between art and visionary experience.

The Sainte-Chapelle in Paris: Kingship, Crusading, and Leg

Speaker: Alyce Jordan
Date: 04/06/2010

In her 2010 Franke Lecture, Alyce Jordan speaks about the Sainte-Chapelle as an activated liturgical and royal space and how and why Louis the Ninth’s chapel proved such a successful vehicle for the articulation of his own monarchic agenda. Professor Jordan’s research focuses on medieval stained glass and questions of narrative, identity, and representation. Her book Visualizing Kingship in the Windows of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris applies contemporary rhetorical theory and practices to better understand the monument and posits a radical re-envisioning of the original ensemble. In her 2010 Franke Lecture, Professor Jordan speaks about the Sainte-Chapelle as an active and activated space and how and why Louis the Ninth’s chapel proved such a successful vehicle for the articulation of his own monarchic agenda.

“Guibert de Nogent and His Demons”

Speaker: Jay Rubenstein
Date: 03/02/2010

Prof. Rubenstein is a historian of medieval intellectual and cultural life in Europe during the 11th and 12th centuries. He is the author of “Guibert of Nogent: Portrait of a Medieval Mind” and co-editor of “Teaching and Learning in Northern Europe, 1000-1200,” among other works. Prof. Rubenstein received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2007. In his 2010 Franke Lecture, Rubenstein discusses the eleventh-century monk and autobiographer, Guibert de Nogent, and works to place him in the particular intellectual and built environments of his time and location, though only fragmentary evidence from these environments survive.

“Romanesque and Gothic as Biblical Architecture”

Speaker: Walter Cahn
Date: 01/19/2010

Mr. Cahn is the author of The Romanesque Wooden Doors of Auvergne; Masterpieces: Chapters on the History of an Idea; and Romanesque Bible Illumination; and numerous articles. He has been the recipient of Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships, and is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. Here, Mr. Cahn, Carnegie Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Yale, delivers the first Franke Lecture in the 2010 series, “The Age of Cathedrals.” Mr. Cahn discusses Romanesque and Gothic as self-consciously biblical architectural forms.

Shake, Rattle, and Roll!

Speaker: Music at the Whitney
Date: 10/10/2009

Music at the Whitney and Yale College New Music present chamber works composed by Yale College students and faculty, performed with members of the Yale Percussion Group. This program features an interesting sonic variety and several different percussion setups: mallet keyboard, suitcase percussion, and a mixed quartet. The student compositions include “Duettino” by Andrew Davis, “Particular Features of the Tule Elk” by Ryan Harper, “Gear Shift” by Stephen Feigenbaum, “…mallet merengue” by Alexander Weiser, and “Play Nice” by Jamie van Dyck. The final work, “Dreams and Reveries,” by faculty codirector Kathryn Alexander, explores the juxtaposition of “found sound”—created with flowerpots, beercan racks, and metal pipes—with more traditional instruments.

emergent(cies)…,

Speaker: Carolyn Nordstrom
Date: 10/03/2009

Ms. Nordstrom’s principal areas of interest are the anthropology of war and peace, illegal economies and power, gender, globalization, and culture theory. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in warzones worldwide, with long-term interests in Southern Africa and South Asia. Her academic books include Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World (2007) and Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the 21st Century (2004). She has received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, as well as numerous other grants, including from the U.S. Institute for Peace. In her 2008 Franke Lecture, anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom examines invisible networks of social spaces and interactions, especially the dangerous extra-state and extra-legal interactions that we are meant not to see. Paul Farmer responds to this talk.