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.