Patten Lecture: Dame Gillian Beer

The last speaker in the 2007-08 Patten Lecture Series is Dame Gillian Beer, King Edward VII Professor of English Literature and President of Clare Hall (ret.), University of Cambridge. Both lectures will be at 7:30 p.m. in Rawles Hall 100 and are free and open to the public.

"Darwin and the Consciousness of Others" (Tuesday, April 8) Beer will discuss Darwin's fascination throughout his life with consciousness across a whole variety of life forms. Beer will examine his early private notebooks where he explored the relations between sentience and reason, emotion and reflection, instinct and intent, as well as in his later works, such as The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, where he works with observations and anecdotes as much as with abstractions-a way of going about things that may often seem odd now. The lecture will investigate Darwin's imaginative capacities and will explore the ways in which his skepticism and his empathy combine to produce particularly fruitful methods of enquiry.

"Darwin's 'filthy heraldries': Why Did Darwin's Theories Cause Scandal?" (Thursday, April 10) Her second lecture will address a number of questions in light of the perspective that even though Darwin was the most pacific of men, his theories caused scandal. Many of his contemporaries experienced profound disturbance, and sometimes disgust, in the face of his theories. What was particularly repellent to those who resisted? And what can those debates tell us about responses now? How did Darwin's emphasis on kinship across species impact the idea of the family? What happens when memory loses its significance for natural history? This lecture will draw on reviews, letters, Punch cartoons, and poetry to explore the reactions of diverse nineteenth century peoples to the changed world that Darwin's ideas proposed. In particular, Beer shall explore the response of some women writers, Constance Naden, Mathilde Blind, May Kendall, and Emily Pfeiffer, who invoked satire and tragedy as means of questioning the human position in the wake of Darwin.

For more information, contact dof@indiana.edu or see http://patten.indiana.edu.

NOTE: Mark your calendar for the 2008-2009 Patten Lectures. See below.

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Thomas Schelling
Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Economics and Public Affairs, University of Maryland
2005 Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics
Lectures: Tuesday, September 23 & Thursday, September 25.

James O'Donnell
Professor of Classics and Provost, Georgetown University, and Past Vice Provost for Information Systems and Computing, University of Pennsylvania
Lectures: Tuesday, October 28 & Thursday, October 30.

Werner Sollors
Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
Lectures: Tuesday, January 20 & Thursday, January 22.
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Best regards,
Nancy


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