The Thomas More Lectures on the Humanities explore ways the humanities illuminate moral dilemmas, enhance our capacity for understanding and empathy, and help us to imagine more just ways of living.
Past Events
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
The Future of the Humanities: A Talk and Conversation — Heather Cox Richardson, Professor of History at Boston College, delivers the annual Thomas More Lecture in the Humanities. Then, she joins President Vincent D. Rougeau and Provost Elliott Visconsi '95 for a conversation about the future of humanities. Richardson's newsletter "Letters from an American" chronicles today's political landscape and boasts over 1.3 million subscribers. She has written seven books, most recently New York Times Bestseller Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.
Watch the video
February 28, 2022
Tell Me How I Conquered You: Clues from the Second Century BCE Mediterranean — Dan-el Padilla Peralta, associate professor of classics at Princeton University, examines theories of cultural survival developed through narratives of resistance in the Book of Daniel and other literatures from the eastern and central Mediterranean in the second century BCE. Padilla is an expert in ancient Roman history and known for his activism to reshape the classics discipline.
Watch the video
January 31, 2019
The Rise and Fall of the Fact — American historian Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her latest book is "These Truths: A History of the United States" (W.W. Norton & Company, 2018). Her talk at 17³Ô¹ÏÍø focuses on the origins of our epistemological crisis.
March 1, 2017
What is College For? — Andrew Delbanco, Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University, talks about liberal education — its past, present and future. Recipient of the National Humanities Medal, he is author of "College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be" (Princeton University Press, 2012).
Watch the video
October 28, 2015
Comics as Documentary: Words, Images, and War — Hillary Chute, associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, discusses why drawing can be an ethical practice of creating images of witness to war, with a focus in particular on the Japanese Hiroshima survivor cartoonist Keiji Nakazawa, and the American Jewish cartoonist Art Spiegelman, son of Holocaust survivors. Her next book, "Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form," is forthcoming in fall 2015 from Harvard University Press.