Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and Cultural Memory

Tanner Lecture on Human Values Wednesday, April 9, 7:00pm Utah Museum of Fine Arts David Damrosch “A Rune of One’s Own: Writing Systems and Cultural Memory” When writing systems spread beyond their language of origin, they bring literacy to formerly oral cultures or intrude on an existing system of writing. The process of learning a […]

A Bus Full of Prophets: Adventures of the Eastern-European Intelligentsia

ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI is considered the leading Polish poet of his generation. He was born in 1945 in Lvov, in the Polish Ukraine, grew up in Gliwice, and graduated from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. During the late seventies he was an active dissident and took part in the oppositional cultural movement, publishing poems and essays […]

Presence and Absence Vision and the Invisible in the Media Age

Bill Viola is considered a pioneer in the medium of video art and is internationally recognized as one of today’s leading artists. He has been instrumental in establishing video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in so doing has helped to greatly expand its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach. […]

Two Souls Intertwined

Abraham Verghese, MD, MACP, is Professor for the Teory and Practice of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Senior Associate Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine. He completed his medical education at Madras Medical College. From Johnson City, Tennessee, where he was a resident, he did his fellowship at Boston University […]

On Reading the Constitution

LAURENCE H. TRIBE is the Ralph S. Tyler, Jr., Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, where he has been a faculty member since 1968. Born in China of Russian Jewish parents, Tribe came to the United States at the age of five, attended public schools in San Francisco, and entered Harvard College in […]

The Twilight of Self-Reliance: Frontier Vulues and Contemporary America

WALLACE STEGNER studied at the University of Utah and the University of Iowa, receiving his Ph.D. from the latter institution in 1735. He is the author of twelve novels and seven nonfiction works, as well as numerous articles and reviews. His Angle of Repose was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1971, and The Spectator Bird […]

Ideas of Power: China’s Empire in the Eighteenth Century and Today

JONATHAN D. SPENCE is Sterling Professor of History at Yale University. He studied at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and received a Mellon Fellowship to support his graduate studies at Yale, where he received his Ph.D. in 1965. In the spring of 1987 he was a visiting professor at the University of Peking, and in 1994 was […]

American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion

JUDITH SHKLAR holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University where she is now John Cowles Professor of Government, and where she has taught modern European and American political theory since 1957. She has been Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge, Carlyle Lecturer at Oxford and has given the Storrs Lectures at the Yale […]

The Future of the Atlantic Alliance

HELMUT SCHMIDT, former Chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982, is a native of Hamburg, where he was educated in political and economic science and took a degree in economics in 1948. As a Social Democrat, he came to his chancellorship having studied the workings of German economic policy firsthand as Joint Minister of […]

The Moral Economy of Speculation: Gambling, Finance, and the Common Good

Michael  J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he teaches political philosophy. He is the author, most recently, of What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Sandel’s writings have been translated into twenty-seven languages. His books include Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, […]