Going Public: Reimagining the PhD

This episode is part of a special series for 2023-2024 featuring some of our popular talks from the center’s annual Katz Distinguished Lecture series. This month’s episode features Robin D.G. Kelley’s talk from 2010 titled “When Africa Was ‘The Thing’: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times.”

A pathbreaking scholar, prolific writer, and engaged intellectual, Robin D.G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times published in 2012, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009), and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002), as well as many co-edited books, including Our History Has Always Been Contraband, with Colin Kaepernick and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, published in 2023. Kelley also frequently writes for a wide range of publications, including The Nation, New York Times, Rolling Stone, Callaloo, and Social Text.

The 2023-2024 season of Going Public features select Katz Distinguished Lectures from our archive. Learn more about the lecture series and peruse the archive:

https://simpsoncenter.org/katz-lectures.

Historians and literary scholars have struggled with the ideas of world history and world literature, but their efforts have largely run parallel with each other. Taking cue from discussions of world history and world literature, how might we conceive of world art and the place of Asian feminist art within it? What new geographies are possible when we consider Asian feminist art on the world scale? Shu-mei Shih explores these questions in her 2012 Katz Distinguished lecture. Her lecture is also the keynote address for New Geographies of Feminist Art: China, Asia, and the World, an international conference that reconsiders the practice, circulation, and cross-cultural significance of feminist art from Asia.

Shih is Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages & Cultures, and Asian American Studies at University of California, Los Angeles, where she holds the Irving and Jean Stone Chair in Humanities. She is the author of Against Diaspora: Discourses on Sinophone Studies published in 2017, Keywords of Taiwan Theory 2019, and Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (2007). She is also the editor of a special issue of PMLA on “Comparative Racialization” (2008). She was awarded a Yu-Shan Scholar Prize from Taiwan’s Ministry of Education for 2022-2025.

The 2023-2024 season of Going Public features select Katz Distinguished Lectures from our archive. Learn more about the lecture series and peruse the archive:

https://simpsoncenter.org/katz-lectures.

In this special edition of Going Public: Reimagining the PhD, Danny Hoffman (Jackson School of International Studies) interviews Catherine Cole, 2022 Katz Distinguished Lecture. Danny is joined by Nikki Yeboah, playwright and assistant professor in University of Washington’s School of Drama.

They discuss the topic of her lecture, which examines how unresolved pasts tend to return. In the aftermath of state-perpetrated injustice, a façade of peace can suddenly give way. In such circumstances, the voices and visions of artists can help us see what otherwise evades perception. Focusing on contemporary performance in post-apartheid South Africa, this lecture will explore how unresolved racialized histories of state-perpetrated violence create conditions of possibility and impossibility for performance artists, choreographers, and theater makers. Cole will be presenting from her recent book, Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice, which brings the most social of art forms—live performance—together with questions about how societies change in the wake of state perpetrated atrocities.

Catherine Cole is Professor of Dance and English at the University of Washington where she served as Divisional Dean of the Arts from 2016-2022. She is an internationally renowned scholar of African performance studies. As a scholar, teacher, and artist, she brings together themes of independence and interdependence, performance in Africa and in the diaspora, disability and movement, post-apartheid art, and postcolonial history. She is the author of Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice published in 2020, and choreographer and performer of dance theatre pieces, including Just Duet, Still Point, and Five Foot Feat.

The 2023-2024 season of Going Public features select Katz Distinguished Lectures from our archive. Learn more about the lecture series and peruse the archive:

https://simpsoncenter.org/katz-lectures

In this special edition of Going Public: Reimagining the PhD, Danny Hoffman (Jackson School of International Studies) interviews Ato Quayson, 2022 Katz Distinguished Lecture.

They discuss the topic of his lecture, which asks, what is the place of disputatiousness in the history of tragic form and how might it help us to further understand tragedy from the Greeks to African literature? The Greeks give us great examples of disputatiousness: Oedipus vs. Tiresias, Clytemnestra vs. Agamemnon, Medea vs. Jason, Antigone vs. Creon. These disagreements were in response to dramatic historical changes that masked themselves as personal differences. This lecture will offer a theory of African and postcolonial tragedy, drawing on historical disputatiousness and its relationship to fraught individual affective economies. Examples will be drawn from different literary traditions and cultures but will specifically focus on the rural novels of Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God).

Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Chair of the Department of English at Stanford. He is the author of Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature published in 2021, and Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism (2014). He is editor of several books, including The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel (2015), and he is host of the YouTube series Critic.Reading.Writing. Professor Quayson is an elected member of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, and the British Academy.

The 2023-2024 season of Going Public features select Katz Distinguished Lectures from our archive. Learn more about the lecture series and peruse the archive:

https://simpsoncenter.org/katz-lectures.

In residence at the Simpson Center as Katz Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities, Romila Thapar conducted a graduate seminar on Early Indian History and contributed to many diverse campus conversations.

Professor Emerita of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, Romila Thapar is one of the world’s foremost experts on ancient Indian history, and a clear voice for the necessity of detailed and nuanced historical study as a foundation for understanding the present and shaping the future. She has published over twenty books, among them, Voices of Dissent: An Essay published in 2020, The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India (2013), and From Lineage to State: Social Formations of the Mid-First Millennium B.C. in the Ganges Valley (1985). Her writing can also be found in the Indian online newspaper The Print and in the New York Times. She is an elected Foreign honorary of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-winner with Peter Brown of the Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity in 2008.

The 2023-2024 season of Going Public features select Katz Distinguished Lectures from our archive. Learn more about the lecture series and peruse the archive:

https://simpsoncenter.org/katz-lectures.

In his 2006 Katz Distinguished Lecture, Richard Salomon discusses the efforts of scholars and Buddhist practitioners to isolate the original teachings of the Buddha out of the enormous volume of Buddhist scriptures as they have been preserved in many different Asian languages and countries.

He also discusses the implications of the recent discoveries of the earliest surviving Buddhist manuscripts -- fragile birch-bark scrolls found in clay pots in ancient Gandhara (now northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan) -- which are believed to be the earliest surviving Buddhist texts. Their importance for Buddhist culture is comparable to that of the Dead Sea Scrolls for Judaism and early Christianity, and Salomon discusses the shifts in point of view and the re-framing of the problem that they necessitate.

Richard Salomon is William P. and Ruth Gerberding University Professor Emeritus of Sanskrit in the Department of Asian Languages & Literature at the University of Washington. He is the former president of the International Association of Buddhist Studies and of the American Oriental Society, and since 1996 the director of the Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project, a joint venture of the British Library and the University of Washington, which is charged with the study and publication of the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts, dating back to the first century BCE. He has published seven books and over 150 articles in these and other fields.

The 2023-2024 season of Going Public features select Katz Distinguished Lectures from our archive. Learn more about the lecture series and peruse the archive:

https://simpsoncenter.org/katz-lectures.

From his creative beginnings as a political cartoonist and journalist to his success as a novelist, essayist, short story writer, screen- and teleplay writer, and university professor, Charles Johnson’s life is a model of interdisciplinarity. In his 2007 Katz Distinguished Lecture, Johnson addresses his personal journey in finding his passion as an artist, writer, and scholar. Johnson discusses how various interrelated factors such as race, culture, faith, and history converged to shape his work.

From his creative beginnings as a political cartoonist and journalist to his acclaim as a novelist, essayist, short story writer, screen- and teleplay writer, and university professor, Charles Johnson’s life is a model of interdisciplinarity. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Washington and is the author of Middle Passage published 1990 and winner of the 1990 National Book Award. He is co-author with Patricia Smith of Africans in America: America’s Journey through Slavery (1998), the companion book for the 1998 PBS series of the same name. Johnson was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1998 and received the Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2002.

The 2023-2024 season of Going Public features select Katz Distinguished Lectures from our archive. Learn more about the lecture series and peruse the archive:

https://simpsoncenter.org/katz-lectures.