Challenging Humanism: Jews, Theory, and Yale During the Closing Decades of the Twentieth Century

Event time: 
Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - 5:00pm to 6:00pm
Location: 
Online See map
Speaker: 
Gregory Jones-Katz, Chinese University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen
Event description: 

From the early 1970s to the late 1980s, a group of second-generation Jewish literary critics, scholars, and poets at Yale University developed Theory from a social standpoint originating outside White, Male, Christian-Protestant perspectives and norms. Informed by changes at the University and across American higher education then decentering humanist culture, these pioneering Jews, first, uncovered and reworked the principles of literary scholarship, and, then, helped inaugurate an array of curricular and intellectual changes. Such changes included the establishment of an undergraduate major in Jewish Studies, the opening of the Holocaust Survivors Film Project, contributions to the Midrash-theory link, and the founding of Orim. With this (anti-)humanist—often de-Christianizing—work, Jews at Yale theorized, and while doing so, also helped enlarge the scope and mission of the academic humanities.

Admission: 
Free but register in advance

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