Date: March 26
Time: 9pm (China time) / 9am (US Eastern time)
Zoom Meeting ID: 344-318-9585
Hosted by the Lab’s faculty and student researchers, the launch will introduce the Lab, its objectives and research projects, as well as a series of exciting events for 2020.
The launch will conclude with a Keynote by Professor Geoffrey Harpham (Senior Fellow, Kenan Institute on Ethics, Duke University) on “Freedom and the Character of Scholarship,” followed by a Question and Answer session. This event will be recorded and posted on the Freedom Lab Website for all to view.
Featured Speaker: Professor Geoffrey Harpham, Duke University
Talk: “Freedom and the Character of Scholarship.”
Abstract: What is a scholar? Although the subject is rarely addressed directly, the act of scholarship requires a certain kind of human character, a certain kind of personality, with particular forms of empowerment and restriction. My primary example will be the great African-American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois ((1868-1963), who set out very deliberately to learn how to be a scholar when he studied at Harvard and the University of Berlin.
Geoffrey Harpham is a Visiting Scholar and Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. He was trained as a literary scholar, but has worked in a wide range of fields within the humanities. His abiding concerns have been ethics and literary study, the concept of language, the work of Joseph Conrad, and, more recently, a variety of issues relating to educational theory and practice, especially the humanities. His more recent books are Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity, The Character of Criticism, and The Humanities and the Dream of America. He is the co-author, with M. H. Abrams, of A Glossary of Literary Terms. From 2003-15, he was the director of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park.
