With the renovation of the new JHU space at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C., AGHI is looking ahead to expanding its events calendar for the coming year—including a new expansion of the Annual Richard A. Macksey Lecture series. For 2024, this means we will hosting our Macksey lecturer twice (with updated dates): Thursday, March 7th in Baltimore and Friday, March 8th in D.C. To kick off this new double-header, we are elated to announce that Professor Merve Emre (Wesleyan) will join us as this year’s speaker.
Baltimore attendees to the 2024 lecture are now invited to register early for Emre’s first talk via our calendar registration page. Full details about both Macksey Lecture events—including specific dates and times, locations, and further info—will be announced in the months to come.
Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism.Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (U. Chicago Press, 2017), The Personality Brokers (selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and The Spectator), The Ferrante Letters (winner of the 2021 PROSE award for literature), and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (2021). She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.
The Annual Richard A. Macksey Lecture draws esteemed scholars from across the humanities and humanistic social sciences, amplifying those teachers and researchers who are leaders at higher-learning institutions around the country and across the world. Invited Macksey Lecture speakers take to the podium to share insights about the state of their disciplinary field(s), the wider landscape of higher education, and the broad social and political moment in which they speak. Recent Macksey lecturers have included Professors Kwame Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Elaine Scarry, and Dan-el Padilla Peralta. Watch available videos of our past events and discover more about former speakers and Dick Macksey’s legacy on the series page.
We hope to see you all there! For updates, be sure to check the page for these 2024 events.