Colloquia and Lectures in the Recent Past
2011-2012
October 11, 2011. Oakley Center Conversation with author and humorist Firoozeh Dumas.
October 12-13, 2011. "An Exploration of the Work of Iranian Filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei." Events organized by Oakley Center; film screenings held at Images Cinema.
2010-2011
October 2, 2010. "The Place of Taste: An Exploration of Food Culture, and Community." Event organized by the Williams College Museum of Art and co-sponsored by the Oakley Center, among other Williams departments and centers, and Gastronomica.
November 11, 2010, Prof. Robin D. G. Kelley (USC), "Thelonious Monk: A Love Story." This was the annual W. Allison Davis 1924 and John A. Davis 1933 Lecture. Special guest appearance by Freddie Bryant, guitar.
November 15, Oakley Center Colloquium: John Kamm (Executive Director, Dui Hua Foundation, and 2004 MacArthur Fellow), "The Business of Human Rights: 20 Years of Dialogue with the Chinese Government." Co-sponsored with International Studies
November 30. Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, PhD (Columbia and CU/NYU Presbyterian Hospital), "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer." The annual Andrew B. Weiss, MD, Lecture on Medicine & Medical Ethics.
January 20, 2011. Robert B. Pippin (U Chicago), "Agency and Fate in Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai." Colloquium in the Oakley Center living room.
March 3, 2011. Sherry Turkle (MIT), "Alone Together: The New Intimacies and Solitudes of the Digital Age." The Richmond Lecture, Brooks-Rogers Recital Hall. Free and open to the public.
April 12, 2011, Peter Suber (Senior research professor, Philosophy, Earlham College; Fellow, Berkman Center, Harvard). "Open Access to Research: What? Why? How?" Oakley Center living room.
April 14, 2011, Toril Moi (Duke), author of Sex, Gender and the Body, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, and other works; "Something that might resemble a kind of love: Fantasy and Realism in Henrik Ibsen's Little Eyolf."
2009-2010
September 24, 2009, Daniel Dennett (Tufts). The Richmond Lecture: "Darwin and the Evolution of Reasons."
September 30, 2009, Poetry reading by Kieron Winn (Oxford). Additional examples of Winn's work here and here. Co-sponsored by the English Department.
October 1, 2009, Colloquium, Richard Sennett (NYU/LSE), "On Craftsmanship."
October 19, 2009, Colloquium, Steve Feld, (UNM/Univ. of Oslo), "Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: A New Series of African Documentaries." Feld discography here. Booklet for Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra DVD here. Co-sponsored by the Williams College Music Department.
November 2, 2009, Weiss Lecture on Medicine and Medical Ethics: Harold Varmus, M.D. (Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center), “Health and Science in the Developing World.”
November 5, 2009, W. Allison Davis 1924 and John A. Davis 1933 Lecture: Angela Riley (Southwestern Law School; Visiting Prof., UCLA Law), "Indigenous Peoples in a Multicultural World."
January 21, 2010, Pepón Osorio, artist, "A Methodology for Creating Art in the Community."
February 23, 2010, Margaret Graver (Classics, Dartmouth), "Anatomies of Joy: Seneca, Claranus, and the Gaudium Tradition."
March 2,2010, Nicholas Dawidoff, "Getting a Life: Notes on Biography and Autobiography." Dawidoff is the author of The Catcher was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg (1994) and In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music (1998), among other works of non-fiction. March 1 addendum: Dawidoff's article, "Race in the South in the Age of Obama," appeared in the February 28 issue of the New York Times Magazine.
April 8, 2010, Sianne Ngai (UCLA), "The Zany Science: Post-Taylorist Performance, Gender, and the Problem of Fun."
April 12, 2010, Seyla Benhabib (Yale), "Cosmopolitanism After Kant: Claiming Rights Across Borders in a New Century."
2008-2009
September 23, 2008, Claudia Stevens (independent actor and playwright) presented her one-woman play Blue Lias, or the Fish Lizard's Whore, at the Centerstage, '62 Center for Theatre and Dance.
September 25, 2008, David Armitage (Harvard), "Civil War from Rome to Iraq: A History in Ideas." Co-sponsored by the History Department, Williams College.
October 2, 2008, Susan Neiman (Philosophy, Einstein Forum, Germany), "What about evil?"
November 6, 2008, Richard Thompson Ford, Stanford Law School. Annual W. Allison Davis '24 and John Davis '33 Lecture, "Race Relations in the USA."
November 17, 2008, Aamir Mufti, Clark-Oakley Fellow, "The missing homeland of Edward Said."
January 14, 2009, Ian Tattersall (Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History), The Richmond Lecture, "Becoming Human: Patterns of Innovation in Human Evolution."
February 24, 2009, Michael Bérubé (English, Penn State), "The Left at War."
March 4, 2009, Ellen Greene (Classics, Univ. of Oklahoma), “Love and War, Ethics and Erotics, in Sappho's Poetic Texts.”
April 14, 2009, Ronald M. Green (Religion, Dartmouth). Annual Weiss Lecture on Medicine & Medical Ethics. "Babies by Design: The Ethics of Genetic Code." Lecture open to the public.
April 23, 2009, Michael Walzer (Institute for Advanced Study), "On just and unjust wars, with particular attention to terrorism and counterinsurgency warfare."
2007-2008
September 20, 2007, Margaret Urban Walker (Philosopher, Arizona State),"Truth as Reparations."
October 16, 2007, Clark Art Institute, Jonathan Katz, Clark-Oakley Humanities Fellow, "Cross (Un)dressing: Art and Eros in the Sixties."
October 17, 2007, Nathan Englander (Writer). Will discuss his recent work, including The Ministry of Special Cases.
October 18, 2007, David Lowenthal (University College, London), "Heritage struggles and ironies of defending imagined pasts."
October 25, 2007, Gerard Aching, NYU, "Liberalisms, Moralizing Literature, and Other Colonial Traps."
November 1, 2007, Simon Doubleday, Hofstra, "In the Light of Medieval Spain: Rethinking 'Relevance' and Ethical Commitment.
November 8, 2007, Charles H. Long, W. Allison Davis '24 and John Davis '33 Lecture, "Religion and the Sociological Imagination of African American Social Scientists."
November 13, 2007, Kai Erikson, Yale, "Reflections on Katrina: A Report from the Field."
January 8, 2008, Lisa Randall (Physics, Harvard), The Richmond Lecture, "Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions."
January 17, 2008, 4 pm, Siva Vaidhyanathan, UVA, "Technofundamentalism." Also at 8 pm, Griffin 3, a lecture, "The Googlization of Everything."
January 23, 2008, Marni Sandweiss (History and American Studies, Amherst), "Passing Strange: The Secret Life of Clarence King."
February 19, 2008, Christopher Kelty (Rice), "Quality, Authority, and Peer Review After the Internet."
April 8, 2008, Helen Epstein, "The Invisible Cure: Africa, The West, and the Fight Against AIDS" (Annual Weiss Lecture).
April 30, 2008, Colin G. Calloway (Dartmouth), "White People, Indians, and Highlanders."
May 1, 2008, Madhavi Sunder (Yale/UC-Davis Law), "The New Enlightenment: How Muslim Women are Bringing Religion Out of the Dark Ages"
2006-2007
September 14, 2006, Adam Phillips, "On What is Fundamental: Psychoanalysis and Fundamentalism."
September 15, 2006, Adam Phillips (This colloquium was based on a selection from Phillips's forthcoming collection of essays, Side Effects.)
October 5, 2006, Margaret Livingstone, Harvard Medical School, "A Conversation on Art and the Biology of Vision"
October 17, 2006, Graham Hammill, Notre Dame, "A Poetics of Political Theology: Harrington with Marvell"
October 30, 2006, Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam, "Re-reading Rembrandt for Our Time: Painting, Philosophy, and the Relation to Sources "
November 2, 2006, Griffin Hall, Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University, "Dead Book"
November 14, 2006, Matt Houlbrook, University of Liverpool, "The Man with the Powderpuff in Interwar London"
November 16, 2006, Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam, "Double Mobility: Toward a Migratory Aesthetics of Video "
November 8, 2006, Dr. Mitch Besser, Founder and Medical Director of mothers2mothers, South Africa- Annual Weiss Lecture: "AIDS in Africa: Simple Answers to Complicated Questions"
December 4, 2006, Philip Bohlman, University of Chicago, "Johann Gottfried Herder and the Ownership of History"
January 10, 2007, Jared Diamond, UCLA - Annual Richmond Lecture
January 11, 2007, Jared Diamond, UCLA, colloquium
February 8, 2007, Pedro Noguera, NYU - Annual W. Allison Davis 1924 and John A. Davis 1933 Lecture
February 19, 2007, K. Anthony Appiah, Princeton University, "Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of Strangers"
February 20, 2007, K. Anthony Appiah, Princeton University, colloquium on the reception of African Art
April 3, 2007, Jacques Rancière, University of Paris-VIII (St. Denis), "The Misadventures of Critical Thinking"
April 4, 2007, Jacques Rancière, University of Paris-VIII (St. Denis) "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge"
April 10 , 2007, William Kentridge, artist (South Africa).