The Romans called their polity SPQR – Senatus populusque romanus, the Roman Senate and people – but the acronym does not encompass the forms of leadership or domination under which they lived for much of their imaginary and recorded history. Because Latin writers lacked a natural term for what the king, Consul, or Caesar was…...
Watch our conversation with Michael S. Roth, intellectual historian and President of Wesleyan University, to explore the value of liberal education across all ages and stages of life. Roth’s most recent book, The Student: A Short History (2023), explores how individuals have learned from antiquity to today. Roth is also author of the award-winning book,…...
Why did the U.S. House of Representatives remove its Speaker for the first time in American history? How will the House choose its next Speaker? And how can history help us to understand this dynamic and challenging political moment? Watch our conversation with Fred Beuttler, Graham School Instructor and former Deputy Historian of the U.S.…...
How has information technology shaped the ideas of civilization over the last 2500 years? Watch our conversation with historian and Graham School instructor Fred Beuttler to explore how IT has impacted the philosophical and spiritual ideas in Western culture. Together, we revisit the struggle between the “Ancients” and the “Moderns,” and look at the relationship…...
This First Friday Lecture is supported by gifts made in memory of Basic Program Instructor Claudia Traudt. What equips us – intellectually and emotionally – for open-mindedness? Is open-mindedness a virtue of the self’s core or of its periphery? How does open-mindedness affect our need for certainty, consistency, and safety? One facet of this big…...
In the era of “post-truth” it has become common to link a crisis of scientific authority with a crisis of liberalism. Democracies around the world are under threat, this reasoning goes, in part because of an attack on scientific truth. But what does liberalism – as political culture and as a form of governance –…...
Watch our conversation with Graham School instructor Clare Pearson to explore Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, which is often described as one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century. Les Misérables is a sophisticated novel that combines history, philosophy, and literature, crossing genres in a way that influenced Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The book interweaves…...
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) has been called “the greatest Portuguese poet of his century” (New Yorker 2017) and his writings have been on the rise in the English-speaking world. Watch our conversation with Katia Mitova on Pessoa’s work. At the time of his death, Pessoa left two trunks full of unpublished manuscripts, only a few of…...
What can fiction teach us about international relations? Watch our conversation with Graham School instructor Jennifer Lind and explore how novels about imagined worlds can inform our understanding of global events in the real-world. In this conversation, we examine two novels: The Remains of the Day by Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro and All Quiet…...
Harnessing a Graham liberal arts education to lead ambitiously and purposefully.