May 11 | Michael Levenson:The Avant-Garde, the University, and the Fate of the Human

Theme：The Avant-Garde, the University, and the Fate of the Human

   
Lecture outline

The lecture will discuss the social formation of the university, offering a theoretical perspective on the everyday life of the academic world. Within that context, I will present thoughts on the architecture of higher education, its relation to the wider culture, and its historical connection to the modernist avant-garde.  I intend to ask about the place of the humanities within contemporary academic life, and the prospects for collaboration among global humanists.

Speaker

Michael Levenson is William B. Christian Professor of English at the University of Virginia and author of A Genealogy of Modernism (Cambridge University Press 1984), Modernism and the Fate of Individuality (Cambridge University Press 1990), The Spectacle of Intimacy (Princeton University Press, co-author Karen Chase 2000),and Modernism from Yale University Press (2011).  He is also the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Modernism (2000, 2nd edition 2011).  Professor Levenson has been chair of the English Department and is the founding director of the Institute of Humanities at the University of Virginia.  He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation and currently serves as a Fulbright Senior Specialist.  He has published widely, with essays in such journals as ELH, Novel, Modernism / Modernity, The New Republic, Wilson Quarterly, Raritan; among his public lectures are those at Harvard, Yale, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Berkeley, and Oxford University.