KU News Release

Hall Center announces 2007-08 Humanities Lecture Series

LAWRENCE — An artist, a journalist and a Pulitzer Prize winner are just three of the speakers for the 2007-08 Humanities Lecture Series, sponsored by the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas.

The series is partially supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Each lecture is free, open to the public and begins at 7:30 p.m. on the date indicated below. Several speakers will also take part in public colloquiums on the mornings following their lectures.

Alexander McCall Smith, best-selling author of the “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” series and “The Sunday Philosophy Club,” will speak Sept. 24 at the Lied Center. His delightful German professor series — “Portuguese Irregular Verbs,” “The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs” and “At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances,” — was published in the United States in January 2005. He is also the author of children’s books, including the “Akimbo” series, about a boy in Africa, and the Harriet Bean books. McCall Smith was born in what is now Zimbabwe and was educated there and in Scotland. For many years, he was a professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh and has been a visiting professor at a number of universities.

Sara Ahmed, professor of race and cultural studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London, is the author of more than 30 articles and book chapters and four books, including “The Cultural Politics of Emotion” and “Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism.” Ahmed works at the intersection between feminist theory, critical race and postcolonial theory and queer studies. Her lecture Oct. 22 at Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union will explore how happiness works as a promise that directs people toward certain objects, as if they provide the necessary ingredients for a good life.

Orville Schell has devoted his professional life to reporting on and writing about Asia. His written work includes 15 books, 10 of them about China. He has also published in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, the New Yorker, Time, Wired and Foreign Affairs, and has been a contributor on China for PBS, NBC and CBS, where a “60 Minutes” program of his won an Emmy. He is currently working on issues of continuing political and economic reform in China. Schell is director of the Asia Society’s newly established Center on U.S.-China Relations in New York and a fellow at the Shorenstein Center at the John F. Kennedy School, Harvard University. Schell’s lecture will take place Nov. 8 at the Kansas Union ballroom and is supported by the Sosland Foundation of Kansas City.

Paul Muldoon, who will speak Feb. 27 at Woodruff Auditorium, is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection “Moy Sand and Gravel.” Muldoon has been described by the Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War.” He is the Howard G.B. Clark ’21 Professor at Princeton University and chair of the University Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. Muldoon has also been professor of poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary fellow of Hertford College.

Ian Buruma, an author, journalist and cultural commentator, was educated in Holland and Japan, where he studied history, Chinese literature and Japanese cinema. In 1970s Tokyo, he was an actor and butoh dancer before turning to a career in documentary filmmaking and photography. In the 1980s, he worked as a journalist and spent much of his early writing career traveling and reporting from all over Asia. He is the author of “Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh” and “The Limits of Tolerance” and has published articles in the New Yorker, the New York Times and the Financial Times. Buruma is currently the Henry R. Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. His talk, the Frances and Floyd Horowitz Lecture devoted to issues related to our multicultural society, will be April 2 at Woodruff Auditorium.

Carol Ann Carter, KU professor of art, has shown her artwork nationally and internationally in numerous individual and group exhibitions. Her creative work, which began in intaglio printmaking, advanced to mixed-media painting and fiber construction in 1984. She is currently working in multimedia installation-performance, mixed media and digital imaging and video and is interested in collaboration across cultures and disciplines in the arts. Her lecture, supported by the Friends of the Hall Center, will take place April 24 at Alderson Auditorium in the Kansas Union.

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