The next week will be a busy one for the Center for the Humanities at UC Merced.
David Palumbo-Liu, the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, will be on campus two days this week. He will deliver a lecture on “Rationality, Racism and Imagining Social Justice” at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday in KL 355. Palumbo-Liu is this year’s Distinguished Lecturer in the Humanities.
Palumbo-Liu’s talk will address the failures of language and law to help in securing social justice, as well as the need for a state-sanctioned and enforced way to express social abhorrence of hate. Using the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown Jr. as examples, he’ll explore the moral imperatives society faces to create a different reality for the nation.
On Thursday, the professor will lead a Q-and-A session on what it means to be a public intellectual. That session begins at 10 a.m. in the Willow Room (COB 322).
Lawson Inada, Oregon’s fifth Poet Laureate, will visit UC Merced next week for a poetry reading and talk related to the Japanese Internment. Inada’s talk, titled “Revisiting America’s Concentration Camps,” will be at 2 p.m. Monday, Feb. 9, in KL 355.
A third-generation Japanese-American, Inada was raised in the Fresno area and interned in a concentration camp at the age of 4 with his family during World War II.
For information, email humanities@ucmerced.edu.
