Lionel Trilling (1905-75), one of Columbia’s most celebrated faculty members, was among the great humanist scholars and public intellectuals of the 20th century. In his memory, The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities sponsors a series of intellectual conversations known as the Lionel Trilling Seminars.

This spring, esteemed law and human rights scholar Kendall Thomas will deliver a lecture entitled “Another University.”

About the talk

The April 1968 student seizure and occupation of five buildings on its Morningside Heights campus is widely regarded as an epochal event in the institutional history of Columbia–and, indeed, in the national history of the American university. “Another University” revisits that episode, looking, specifically, at how idea-images of race get put to work in two contemporaneous artifacts from the Columbia archive: the May 1968 audio interview “Reminiscences of Lionel Trilling” and Crisis At Columbia: The Report of the Fact Finding Commission Appointed to Investigate the Disturbances at Columbia University in April and May 1968, which was published by Random House Vintage Press in October 1968. Nash Professor of Law and co-director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia Law School Kendall Thomas traces some of the connections between the use (and abuse) of race language in the 1960s American university and the politics of racial rhetoric and representation in the present day.

Speaker

Kendall Thomas is the Nash Professor of Law at Columbia University. He is a scholar of comparative constitutional law and human rights whose teaching and research focus on critical race theory, legal philosophy, feminist legal theory, and law and sexuality. He is the co-founder and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia Law School, where he leads interdisciplinary projects and programs that explore how the law operates as one of the central ways to create meaning in society. He is a founder of Amend the 13th, a movement to amend the U.S. Constitution to end enforced prison labor. He has written and spoken widely on the impact of AIDS and was a founding member of the Majority Action Caucus of ACT UP, Sex Panic!, and the AIDS Prevention Action League. A former board member of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, he now serves on the board of the NYC AIDS Memorial.

He is also a professional jazz vocalist who performs at venues including Joe’s Pub and is on the board of advisors of the Broadway Advocacy Coalition.

Respondents

Bernard E. Harcourt is a contemporary critical theorist, advocate, and the author most recently of Critique & Praxis (Columbia 2020), which won the 46th annual Lionel Trilling Prize. He is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. Harcourt is the Founding Director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. He is also a directeur d’études (chaired professor) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Socialesin in Paris. Harcourt served as visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2016-2017.

Patricia J. Williams, one of the most provocative intellectuals in American law and a pioneer of both the law and literature and critical race theory movements in American legal theory, holds a joint appointment between the School of Law and the Department of Philosophy and Religion in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Northeastern University. She is also director of Law, Technology and Ethics Initiatives in the School of Law and the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. A MacArthur Genius awardee, Professor Williams previously served as the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.

Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.

The Lionel Trilling Seminars are made possible by the generosity of The Friends of the Heyman Center. The Lionel Trilling Seminars Committee wishes to thank the Center for Contemporary Critical Thought and the Studio for Law and Culture at Columbia Law School, as well as the staff of the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities for their support.