Julia S. Phelps Annual Lecture in the Arts and Humanities

The Julia S. Phelps Annual Lecture in the Arts and Humanities was established to honor the late Julia S. Phelps, longtime instructor in the Radcliffe Seminars, and is supported by the generous contributions of her family, friends, and colleagues.

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A New History of America’s Longest War

This year's Julia S. Phelps Annual Lecture in the Arts and Humanities will be given by 2023–2024 Rita E. Hauser Fellow Matthieu Aikins.

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A Ballad for Grace Lamb

This year's Julia S. Phelps Annual Lecture in the Arts and Humanities will be given by Marilyn Beaudry-Corbett Schlesinger Fellow Saidiya V. Hartman, who will discuss her book-in-progress, "A Ballad for Grace Lamb," a serial portrait of Harlem leftists in the 1920’s and 30’s.

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The Heisenberg Variations: Imagination, Invention, and Uncertainty

How do we create art? How do we become ourselves? In this year’s Julia S. Phelps Annual Lecture in the Arts and Humanities, Jennifer Finney Boylan considers the way revision and reinvention serve—not only as necessary aspects of the creative process—but also as a model for the way we live our lives, and create ourselves, through trial and error.

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Why the Mississippi Delta Matters

This year’s Julia S. Phelps Annual Lecture in the Arts and Humanities will feature W. Ralph Eubanks RI ’22, who seeks to tell the story of the struggle toward transformation in the Delta.

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And So On: Reading and Conversation with Kiese Laymon

Kiese Laymon will talk with Courtney R. Baker about whether the actual histories of American colleges and universities should be ripe sites for Black American horror and comedic narratives. 

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Diary of a Tap Dancer

During her fellowship, Ayodele Casel RI '20 is working on Diary of a Tap Dancer, a theatrical work positioning tap dance as the driving force of the narrative. This project aims to create a fuller and more accurate picture of the legacy of the art form by centering the voices of its unnamed women within a broader historical context. 

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Are Koreans Human? Our Survival Powers, the Quest for Superpowers, and the Problem of Invulnerability

Who are the modern Koreans, and what do they care about? Koreans have experienced colonialism, diaspora, war, national division, immigration, and a persistent nuclear threat—and yet, they have achieved extraordinary gains in their homelands and elsewhere.

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The Writer and the Critic: Marilynne Robinson and James Wood in Conversation

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Marilynne Robinson is in a conversation with literary critic James Wood, professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University and a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine.

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War and the Soundscapes of Memory

As the generation with a living memory of the Second World War recedes, the critic and cultural historian Jeremy Eichler RI '17 asks us to open our ears. By exploring how the wartime past has been inscribed in music, he makes the case for hearing history, and for reclaiming the power of sound as a unique carrier of meaning about the past.

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Naked Body Language—Dance Is Time and Gesture Is Meaningless

Through dialogue, video, dance, and discussion, Karole Armitage RI '16 explores how meaning is made in dance without words, plot, or story to explore material from theoretical physics to a personal search for meaning.


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The Thousands

Author ZZ Packer RI '15 reads an excerpt from her novel-in-progress titled "The Thousands," which chronicles the lives of several families—black, white, and Indian—shortly after the Civil War, through Reconstruction and the "Indian Campaigns" in the Southwest.

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Lies That Tell the Truth: Story and History in the Novel

"I’ve long been interested in the ways writers interlace real events with fictional ones—how we study and transform the past for the purpose of writing stories and novels, and how tension among history, speculation, and pure invention can lend energy to a piece of work, both for the writer and the reader," says Julie Orringer RI '14.

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Neither a Borrower nor a Lender Be: Homage, Appropriation, and Influence

"I spent the year after graduation from university travelling around Europe and North Africa and writing a novel: 'The Oubliette.' Shortly before my 22nd birthday, I sat down to read my hard-won pages and discovered that I had written a novel bad in more ways than can easily be imagined," says Margot Livesey RI '13.

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Can We Keep Up? Theater's Incredible Ability to Evolve

John Tiffany discusses the complexities involved in establishing a new national theater in a culture where artists and audiences are demanding innovative and interactive relationships with each other. How will theater keep up?

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