The Alexander Grass Humanities Institute’s Annual Richard A. Macksey Lecture (2024)

We are delighted to announce Dr. Merve Emre as our next Macksey lecturer! Dr. Emre will join us for TWO dates in 2024—first, at JHU’s Homewood campus, on March 7th; and then, inaugurating AGHI’s Macksey series in JHU’s new space at 555 Pennsylvania Ave in DC, the next day (March 8th).

Register now for either (or both!) of Emre’s talks [free and open to the public]: Register Here.

ABOUT THIS YEAR’S SPEAKER:

Merve 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.

Talk—March 8:

• “Why I Feel Bad for Men, or Reading ‘A Room of One’s Own’ with Pierre Bourdieu”
• Location: 555 Penn Ave NW (JHU Bloomberg Center, DC)
• Time: 5:30pm

About this talk:

Virginia Woolf is one of the great social theorists of the school. The fact that she has never been described as such testifies to the two exclusions of which she speaks in A Room of One’s Own (1929)—the exclusion of women from the university and the exclusion of fiction from the received genres of knowledge. That fiction may have an equal or greater claim to knowledge than social scientific writing is readily granted by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who credits Woolf, and Woolf alone, with telling the truth about gender and education. This talk, which itself will be part fiction, puts Woolf and Bourdieu into dialogue to grasp what is truly at stake in her splendid 1929 essay: the life of the mind and the death of the imagination in the university, for women and men alike.

Learn more about the Macksey Lecture series and our past speakers here.