Rhodes College’s “Communities in Conversation” Series will present three public lectures for Fall 2014. The series provides the insights of scholars, philosophers, historians, artists, and other thought leaders on the big issues faced nationally and around the world. Free and open to the public, they take place on the Rhodes campus.
Sept. 8-Constitution Day Lecture: Melvin Urofsky, “Dissent and the Constitution”
Blount Auditorium in Buckman Hall-5 p.m.; reception to follow
Dr. Melvin I. Urofsky, professor of history at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, will deliver the college’s annual Constitution Day Lecture. A noted historian of the Supreme Court and the Constitution, Urofsky will explore some of the great dissents and dissenters in the history of the United States Supreme Court. He will discuss how dissenting opinions, which represent the “losing” side of a case, play an important role in the nation’s ongoing constitutional conversation and sometimes end up shaping future decisions.
Urofsky is author of more than 50 books including the definitive biography of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and The Supreme Court Justices: A Biographical Dictionary.
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Oct. 23-Michael Roth, “Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters”
McCallum Ballroom in Bryan Campus Life Center-6 p.m.
Dr. Michael S. Roth is president of Wesleyan University. He will draw on his new book, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (Yale University Press, 2014), to discuss the debate over the benefits—or drawbacks—of a broad-based liberal education. Critics of higher education have attacked its irrelevance and elitism—often calling for more vocational instruction. Roth will focus on important moments and seminal thinkers in America’s long-running argument over vocational vs. liberal education, including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, Jane Addams and John Dewey to develop his own defense of a “pragmatic liberal education.”
Roth is author of five books of intellectual history including Memory, Trauma and History. He also teaches history and the humanities at Wesleyan and offers the online course, “The Modern and the Post-Modern.”
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Nov. 13-James LeSueur, “Between Terror and Democracy”
Blount Auditorium in Buckman Hall-6 p.m.
Dr. James D. LeSueur is professor of history at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and has been a senior associate member of the Middle East Centre at St Antony′s College, Oxford. An expert on Algeria, political Islam, French history and decolonization, he currently is producing a documentary film on the Algerian civil war.
LeSueur will discuss the upheaval that occurred in Algeria in the early 1990s, when Islamic reformers were democratically elected for the first time in the Middle East, only to be confronted by the Algerian military. As a result, the country plunged into a decade-long civil war. In his talk, LeSueur will examine what went wrong and discuss Algeria’s controversial experiments to achieve reconciliation with militant Islamists.
His books include Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria and The Decolonization Reader.
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Find Communities in Conversation onFacebook.com/Communities.in.Conversation or on Twitter, @Rhodes_CiC.
For more information, contact Dr. Jonathan Judaken, the Spence L. Wilson Chair in Humanities at Rhodes, at judakenj@rhodes.edu or (901) 843-3292.