Mandel Lectures in the Humanities
The goal of the Mandel Lectures in the Humanities is to promote the study of the humanities at Brandeis University. The series launched in 2011, following the 2010 opening of the Mandel Center for the Humanities.
Each year, prominent scholars deliver a series of three lectures and conduct an informal seminar during their stay on campus. The series is unique in its rotation of disciplines or fields within the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Following the completion of each year's lectures, the talks are published in book form for Brandeis University Press. The resulting series of books reflects both the interdisciplinary mission of the Mandel Center, and the wide range of extraordinary work being done in the humanities today.
Mandel Lectures in the Humanities Fall 2022
Kareem Khubchandani is an associate professor of theater, dance, and performance studies at Tufts University whose research and creative work centers on queer, feminist, and trans aesthetics, namely in South Asia and its diasporas. Performing under the name LaWhore Vagistan, Kareem utilizes drag performance as a pedagogical tool. He is the author of Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Outstanding Book award, 2021 Dance Studies Association de la Torre Bueno book award, and the 2019 CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies Fellowship. He is also co-editor of Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2021) and curator of criticalauntystudies.com.
Dragademia - Dressing Up the University
Thursday, October 27
4:00-5:30PM
Laurie Theater, Spingold Theater Center
Followed by reception in Merrick Theater.
Lessons in Drag, with LaWhore Vagistan
Friday, October 28
5:00-6:30PM
Laurie Theater, Spingold Theater Center
Divas, Drag Queens, Aunties, and Other Academic Personas
Tuesday, November 1
5:30-7:00PM
MCH G03
Past Lectures
Colm Tóibín, Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities
Columbia University
- Lecture 1: "Between Heaven and Harlem: James Baldwin's Beginnings"
- Lecture 2: "Stranger in Each Village: James Baldwin in the World"
"We the People": Protest Music in America and the Black Freedom Struggle
Daphne A. Brooks, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, Music, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies
Yale University
- Lecture 1: "Invisible Music: The Sonic Idea of Black Revolution from Captivity to Reconstruction"
- Lecture 2: "Solidarity in Sound: Grassroots Arrangements & Civil Rights Transformation"
- Lecture 3: "'Scratching the Celluloid': Sonic Plotting & Planning while Facing the 21st Century Catastrophe"
Environmental Humanities and the New Mobilities of the Anthropocene: Climate Change and Animal Migrations in the North
Nancy Langston, Distinguished Professor of Environmental History, Member of the Great Lakes Research Center
Michigan Technological University
The Alien, The Ghost, The Post-human: Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China
David Der-Wei Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature
Harvard University
Resulting Book Publication: “Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China” (forthcoming October 2020)
Provincializing Europe in a Warming World: On the Relevance and Limits of Postcolonial Criticism
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College
University of Chicago
Memoirs of a Jewish Girlhood
Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Religions
University of Chicago Divinity School
also in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, the Committee on Social Thought, and the College
Resulting Book Publication: “The Donigers of Great Neck: A Mythologized Memoir” (2019)
Divine Spark of Syracuse
Ingrid Rowland, Professor of Classical and Renaissance Architecture
University of Notre Dame
Resulting Book Publication: “The Divine Spark of Syracuse” (2018)
Letters to a Young Writer
James Wood
Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism
Harvard University
Resulting Book Publication: “The Nearest Thing to Life” (2015)
Judaizing Aesthetics: Painting, Poetry, Politics
David Nirenberg, Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought, Medieval History, Fundamentals, Middle East Studies, Romance Languages and Literatures, and the College
University of Chicago
Resulting Book Publication: “Aesthetic Theology and its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics” (2015)