Seth Moglen: “Public Humanities in the Age of Trump: Forging Democracy in the Face of Plutocratic Populism”

Event time: 
Thursday, April 6, 2017 - 5:30pm
Location: 
Gordon Parks room at 81 Wall Street See map
Event description: 
Seth Moglen is Associate Professor of English and an affiliated faculty member in the Africana Studies and American Studies Programs at Lehigh University, where he was the founding co-director of the South Side Initiative. The author of Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism, Moglen has published widely on emancipatory literary and political movements in the United States. He is now at work on a book, Bethlehem: American Utopia, American Tragedy, which employs modernist literary techniques to explore the 270-year history of one iconic American city.
 
In this talk, Moglen will argue that the only effective alternative to plutocratic populism is actual democracy, particularly at a time when the anger of dispossessed working-class communities has been cynically manipulated in the interest of wealthy elites. Scholars, teachers and students in the humanities have an important role to play in cultivating democratic cultures and communities, where they live, work and learn.
 
In this lecture, Moglen will describe recent public humanities work supported by Lehigh University’s South Side Initiative (SSI), a wide-ranging project of university-community collaboration in the postindustrial city of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
 

Co-sponsored with Yale Public Humanities.