Annual Distinguished Lecture

The 2012 FHI Annual Distinguished Lecture will be delivered by Joan Wallach Scott, Harold F. Linder Professor at the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study on Tuesday, April 3.

Joan Scott's work has challenged the foundations of conventional historical practice, including the nature of historical evidence and historical experience. Drawing on a range of philosophical thought, as well as on a rethinking of her own training as a labor historian, she has contributed to the formulation of a field of critical history. Written more than twenty years ago, her now classic article, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," continues to inspire innovative research on women and gender. In her latest work she has been concerned with the ways in which difference poses problems for democratic practice. She has taken up this question in her most recent books: Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man; Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism; and the The Politics of the Veil. She is currently extending her work on the veil to a comparative historical study on the relationship between secularism and gender equality.

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Previous FHI Annual Distinguished Lectures:

2011: Salman Rushdie, "Public Events/Private Lives: Literature and Politics in the Modern World"
2010: Pauline Yu, "'An Opportunity to Teach and to Lead': The Humanities Today"
2009: Homi Bhabha, "Also, I Know That a Man Can Become of an Incredible Wickedness Very Suddenly": Time, Agency, and the Banality of Evil"
2008: Roger Chartier, "Cardenio between the Sierra Morena, Whitehall and Parisian Stages"
2007: Anthony Appiah, "West of What?"
2006: Isaac Julien, "Somewhere Else: Theorizing the Making of True North, Fantôme Afrique, and Baltimore"
2005: Mieke Bal, "Making and Understanding: Video and Migration"
2004: Romila Thapar, "Cultural Pasts: History and Beyond"
2003: Emory Elliott, "National Dreams and Rude Awakenings: The American Myths of Isolation and Innocence"

From 2003-08, the FHI Annual Lecture was supported by the Mellon Foundation.