1. Events
  2. Humanities

Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

Humanities Forum — Phillip Mitsis

Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery

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?”

What Storm, What Thunder Panel Discussion

Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery

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.

Humanities Forum — Dagmawi Woubshet

Albin O. Kuhn Library 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.

Humanities Forum — Adrian De Leon

Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery

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.

46th Annual W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture — Nikki M. Taylor

University Center Ballroom

The 46th Annual W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture, organized by the Department of Africana Studies, presents Nikki M. Taylor, professor of history at Howard University, who will speak on Seizing Justice with their Own Hands: Enslaved Women and Lethal Resistance. In this lecture, Taylor contends that enslaved black women carried deep and personal ideas about justice, which they exercised to resist slavery and ultimately end the tyranny of their enslavers. This event is part of the Fall 2024 Social Sciences Forum and Humanities Forum.

CANCELED — A Conversation with Jelani Cobb: The Half-Life of Freedom, Race and Justice in America Today

University Center Ballroom

Jelani Cobb’s riveting, hopeful keynotes are up-to-the-moment meditations and breakdowns of the complex dynamics of race and racism in America. Whether speaking on Black Lives Matter and activism, the battle zones of Ferguson or Baltimore, the legacy of a black presidency, or the implications of the Trump era — or, more generally, on the history of civil rights, violence, and inequality in employment, housing, or incarceration in the US — Cobb speaks with the surety and articulate passion of only our best journalists.

A Conversation with Jelani Cobb: The Half-Life of Freedom, Race and Justice in America Today

Fine Arts Recital Hall MD

Jelani Cobb’s riveting, hopeful keynotes are up-to-the-moment meditations and breakdowns of the complex dynamics of race and racism in America. Whether speaking on Black Lives Matter and activism, the battle zones of Ferguson or Baltimore, the legacy of a black presidency, or the implications of the Trump era — or, more generally, on the history of civil rights, violence, and inequality in employment, housing, or incarceration in the US — Cobb speaks with the surety and articulate passion of only our best journalists.

Tatiana Mann: Find Your Why

216 Performing Arts and Humanities Building

In Find Your Why, presented by the Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA), Tatiana Mann will lead us to explore why we engage with our disciplines, what informs our decisions and how to light our creative fire to fuel our future success. As artists and humanists, why do we choose our career paths? Because of lucrative remuneration (supported by plentiful research grants) and a lavish lifestyle (afforded by sleepless nights working several jobs)? In pursuit of quixotic research, prestigious performances, exhibitions, publications, and accolades? Or do we choose to do what we do because at some point we couldn’t imagine a life without art, or without investigating humanity’s larger questions?

Neuroscience, Freewill, and Moral Responsibility

Fine Arts Recital Hall MD

The Center for Ethics and Values holds regular public forums focusing on significant ethics issues faced by researchers across the university, by students, and more broadly by society. This event, Neuroscience, Freewill, and Moral Responsibility, moderated by Steve Yalowitz, associate professor of philosophy at UMBC, features panelists Adina Roskies, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, with an appointment in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, UC Santa Barbara, and Aaron Schurger, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology and the Brain Institute, Chapman University.

Humanities Forum — Antonia Hylton

Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery

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.

The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

Fine Arts Recital Hall MD

The Center for Ethics and Values presents a discussion, The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, featuring three panelists — Kathy Baxter, Principal Architect of Ethical AI Practice at Salesforce; David Danks, Professor of Data Science, Philosophy, & Policy, UC San Diego; and Gabriella Waters, Director of Operations and Director of the Cognitive and Neurodiversity AI Lab (CoNA) at the Center for Equitable AI & Machine Learning Systems, Morgan State University. The conversation will be moderated by Blake Francis.

Humanities Forum — Tommy Orange — Canceled

Earl and Darielle Linehan Concert Hall Earl and Darielle Linehan Concert HallCatonsville, MD, United States

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.

Humanities Forum — Nicole R. Fleetwood

Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery

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.

Humanities Forum — Jason Loviglio

Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery

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.

Humanities Forum — Samuel Scheffler

Fine Arts Recital Hall MD

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.

Scroll to Top