Katz Distinguished Lectures in the Humanities

Doris Sommer is Ira Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures and Professor of African & African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (2004), Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas (1999), and is completing Ripple Effects: The Work of Art in the World.

UW Kane Hall, Room 110, 7:00 p.m. Interested in the intersections of art, history, and science, Linda Bierds’ poems feature rich portraits of historical figures beyond their great achievements. Instead, she situates them in intimate, everyday moments, and by doing so presents the unique ways in which each interprets the world: Benjamin Franklin as a boy using a kite to pull himself across a pond, Beethoven being brought his ear trumpet by a small child, a young Galileo conducting experiments.