Event Details - Michael Berube speaker

The lecture surveys the intellectual state of the humanities since 1980, finding not the dessicated landscape described by conservative critics but a vibrant array of fields asking the most important questions one can ask about what it means to be human. The talk centers on the decades-long debate about the status of universalism, asking not only what it means to think of all humans as “equal” in a meaningful sense but also why so many scholars in the humanities have become skeptical of this ideal. Taking on critiques of universalism from queer theory and disability studies, I conclude that universalism remains desirable precisely because it is open to all such challenges.