This course, assembled by historians N. D. B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain, includes suggested readings and other resources from more than one hundred scholars in a variety of disciplines. The course explores Donald Trump’s rise as a product of the American lineage of racism, sexism, nativism, and imperialism. It offers an introduction to the deep currents of American political culture that produced what many simply call “Trumpism”: personal and political gain marred by intolerance, derived from wealth, and rooted in the history of segregation, sexism, and exploitation.

November 17, 2016, 5:00 p.m. – Gilman Hall 50, Homewood Campus

The Charles Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe presents Anthony Grafton of Princeton University to discuss “Life in the Margins: Discovering the History of Reading in Early Modern Europe”, Earle Havens of Johns Hopkins University to discuss “The Archaeology of the Archaeology of Reading: Digging into Marginalia Data”, and Christopher Geekie of Johns Hopkins University to discuss “Literature at the Margins: Gabriel Harvey and Rabelais”. This event is co-sponsored by the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute.

November 14, 2016, 7:00 p.m. – The Ivy Bookshop, 6080 Falls Rd, Baltimore, MD 21209

The Ivy Bookshop, in conjunction with the Johns Hopkins University Alexander Grass Humanities Institute and Department of English, announces a reading and conversation with the acclaimed South African novelist Henrietta Rose-Innes. Rose-Innes will read from the U.S. edition of her award-winning third novel “Nineveh,” forthcoming from Unnamed Press. In addition to having won the Caine Prize in 2008, she is the author of four novels and a short story collection. Rose-Innes is now among the most innovative and topical young literary voices in the UK, where she is completing a Creative Writing PhD at the University of East Anglia.

November 10, 2016, 7:30 p.m. – Bird in Hand, 9 E. 33rd Street, Baltimore

The Alexander Grass Humanities Institute and PLAS present Andrés Neuman, who will lead a discussion about his latest work. Eye-opening and charmingly offbeat, “How to Travel without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America” is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of the Americas.

November 10, 2016, 5:15 p.m. – 7:15 p.m. – Gilman 138D, Homewood Campus

The Alexander Grass Humanities Institute presents Jason Wirth, Professor of Philosophy and Associate Professor of Film Studies at Seattle University, who will discuss, “Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis.”

November 7, 2016, 5:30 p.m. – Hodson Hall, Room 110, Homewood Campus

The Program in Museums and Society presents a film screening, The Destruction of Memory.
Based on the book by Robert Bevan, this documentary film investigates the war against culture and the ongoing battle to save it.
Q&A with director/producer Tim Slade following the screening.
Co-sponsored by the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute.
This event is free and open to the public.

As academe’s hoped-for recovery from the 2008 financial crisis recedes before it like the shimmer of water on a hot roadway, the problems of its humanities component are up close […]

Charles S. Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe presents the Fourth Singleton Distinguished Lecture Series, “Papal Bull: Politics, Propaganda, and Print in Renaissance Rome,” by Margaret Meserve, University of Notre Dame. Three lectures held at Homewood, Johns Hopkins University, Sept. 19-22, 2016.

At the close of the Middle Ages, the papacy controlled the largest, most sophisticated communication apparatus of any state in Europe. Yet the late medieval papacy was also an institution in crisis, facing doctrinal and political challenges from all sides. The fifteenth-century popes deployed various strategies to reinforce their claims to authority – diplomatic, doctrinal, ritual, architectural, and artistic. These lectures will explore how the Renaissance papacy added the new technology of printing to its political armamentarium in the first fifty years after the invention of movable type.

Critical Climate Thinking is an interdisciplinary lecture series that aims to generate a conversation concerning climate change not merely as a scientific phenomenon but as a persistent dimension of lived experience. It approaches the cosmos not only as an object outside us, but as something in us.

On Thursday, Sept. 22, Peter K. Haff, Professor Emeritus of Geology and Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke University, will discuss, “Do Humans Cause Climate Change? The Earth’s Perspective.”

Philanthropist Elizabeth Grass Weese and her brother, Roger Grass, have committed $10 million to advance humanities scholarship and teaching at the Johns Hopkins University and to promote literature, art, philosophy, history, and other cultural studies in Baltimore and the wider community. Their gift, through the Alexander Grass Foundation, is the largest ever to Johns Hopkins exclusively for the support of the humanities.