News & Events
Patten Lectures This Week
10/27/2008
Classicist James J. O’Donnell, provost at Georgetown University and Patten Lecturer, considers the meaning of history.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
“Two Hundred Years is a Long Time (for a historian), or, What Should Historians Write About”
7:30 p.m.
Ballantine Hall 109
What should history be “about”? The long-term
movement of DNA-carrying peoples and their economic development,
or the crises of a given president or prime minister. Ancient
history and its narratives shaped much of what we think of as
history, so this lecture will use Greco-Roman examples to think
through these issues and show that the title of the lecture,
though seemingly an obvious fact, is actually a daring
proposition for a historian to utter.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
“Ten Years Is a Long Time (on the Internet), or, What Will Cyberspace Make of the Humanities?”
7:30 p.m.
Ballantine Hall 109
Mass usage of the Internet is in its second decade, and Professor
O’Donnell’s Avatars of the Word, a study of
the place of media in cultural history, is just ten years old.
What have we learned, what haven’t we learned, and
especially: what sense do we make of the scale and speed of
change for our most traditional ways of building and preserving
culture?
