The annual Ancient Studies Week Lecture features Phillip Mitsis of New York University. In reading ancient philosophers, we often face unsettling claims. A case in point is Plato’s view of hatred: he thinks that children must be taught to love the right things and to hate bad things. This talk examines the place of hatred in our moral lives and asks such questions as “Should we hate racism, genocide, sexism, etc., or is there no place for that?”

Maryland Humanities developed the One Maryland One Book (OMOB) initiative “to bring together diverse people in communities across the state through the shared experience of reading the same book.” This year's One Maryland One Book is What Storm, What Thunder by Myriam J.A. Chancy, and UMBC will participate in a statewide conversation about the title, which explores the impact of a 7.0 earthquake on the intersecting lives of a community in Haiti. This panel discussion — Community Restoration and Building the Future — is hosted UMBC's Department of Emergency and Disaster Health Systems, Center for Global Engagement, and Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery.

The annual Daphne Harrison Lecture features Dagmawi Woubshet, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Associate Professor, English, University of Pennsylvania, who will speak on James Baldwin and the Art of Late Style. James Baldwin has come back with full force in our era of Black Lives Matter. In the 100 years since his birth, he has become the most cited literary artist—living or dead—on matters of race on social media since the Ferguson Uprising, his words deployed to expose white power and innocence and to express black rage and ethics. Decades after his death, the fact that Baldwin’s words ring loud and true today not only testifies to his genius, but also offers an indictment of an America that continues to disparage, torture, and murder black people with impunity.

In this Humanities Forum talk, Adrian De Leon, Assistant Professor, History, New York University, discusses Diaspora’s Boondocks: Hinterlands in Filipino American History. How were the native people from the margins of empire, from Christianized lowlands peasants to sovereign indigenous people in the mountainous highlands, thrust into the center of late Spanish and American imperial projects of race-making across the Pacific? In this talk, Adrian De Leon re-routes the history of Filipino American migration to its indigenous roots in the bundok (Tagalog: the hinterland) of Northern Luzon.

In this Humanities Forum talk, Peabody and Emmy-award winning journalist Antonia Hylton will read from and discuss her recent book, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum. Madness chronicles the 93-year history of Crownsville State Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system.

In this Humanities Forum talk, award-winning author Tommy Orange will converse with community-based visual artist and folklorist Ashley Minner Jones (Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina) about his recent novel, Wandering Stars. A follow-up to his bestselling debut, There There, Wandering Stars traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family.

In this Humanities Forum talk, Nicole R. Fleetwood emerges from her current book project, Between the River and the Railroad Tracks, part memoir and part cultural history of growing up in Hamilton, Ohio. Her exploration of her hometown is a lens to meditate on the cultural life and labor of the Black Midwest through its music, art, and community practices.

Podcasts are the latest in a long list of media formats hailed as "empathy machines," technologies that will, by dint of their reach and affective force, compel us to care about one another. Radio, films, novels, and telegrams have all been previously designated as such. In the United States, public radio has, over the last 60 years, staked out a special claim for its capacity for empathy. This talk will explore the migration of the public radio structure of feeling as it migrated into narrative podcasting over the last two decades.

The Oxford philosopher Toby Ord estimates that there is a one in six chance that humanity will experience an “existential catastrophe” within the next hundred years. By an existential catastrophe he means either the extinction of humanity or some other event, like the irreversible collapse of civilization, that destroys what he calls humanity’s “long-term potential.” If it is true that humanity faces a serious risk of existential catastrophe within the next hundred years, how should we respond? In this talk, Samuel Scheffler will address this question and offer a compelling response to the prospect of existential catastrophe.