All This Rising: The Humanities in the Next Ten Years

"Darkness Visible: the Haunted House of Classics"

Lecture by Dan-el Padilla PeraltaAssociate Professor of Classics, Princeton University

Drawing on the writings of Avery Gordon, Saidiya Hartman, and César Sánchez Beras, this talk seeks to generate critical momentum around the premise that Classics is a ghostly matter, haunted by its participation in global projects of race-making but intent on denying or veiling its role in them. In heeding the call to resist “happy face Classics” (Rosa Andújar), Peralta argues for an explicitly foregrounded commitment to a reparative intellectual history of the discipline—one that owns up fully to the field’s past and contemporaneous investments in Euro-American settler-colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade.  

Join us for the inaugural lecture in this new series, featuring ideas and methods that will mark new paths for the humanities in the next decade. Visitors will present their work in both unmediated and ‘meta’ modes. They will consider the motives and conventions of the work in progress, how it converses with its discipline, and what it portends for the humanities. 

Following the lecture there will be opportunity for Q&A with Professor Peralta.