2025 Franke Visiting Fellow Lecture at the Whitney Humanities Center
Welcome: Cajetan Iheka, Director, Whitney Humanities Center
Introduction: Stephanie Newell, Professor of English
Jennifer Makumbi introduces her forthcoming pan-African novel, Alkebulan: When the Lions Returned, followed by a reading and discussion.
How are power structures and empathy implicated in translation? What do we owe asylum seekers, and the stories they bring? What does it mean to bear witness, or to take action? Based on her experiences as an observer and translator in different parts of the U.S. immigration system, Alejandra Oliva reflects on the ways, both big and small, that the system fails the people within it—and the shift required to fix it.
This talk will examine the life and thought of Salo Baron, one of the great twentieth-century historians who was among the first to bring Jewish Studies to the American university. The talk will trace Baron’s commitment to rebutting the so-called lachrymose conception of Jewish history by emphasizing the theme of survival, but it will also examine that critique in the context of Holocaust memory that gradually began to emerge after the Second World War.
Meyer teaches English and American literature and modern intellectual history at Washington University in St. Louis, where he specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry, literature, and science. He is the author of Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science.
