On Beauty and Being Just: Reckoning with a Plague Year

The Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics is pleased to announce this upcoming lecture.

A Lecture by Elaine Scarry, Ph.D., Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Harvard University

Elaine Scarry is Harvard University's Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value. Her work has two central subjects, the nature of physical injury and the nature of human creation. The Body in Pain brings the subjects of injuring and creating together: it shows that the willful infliction of pain and injury is the opposite of creation, since it apes and inverts the ordinary work of the imagination. On Beauty and Being Just shows that beauty and justice are alike in having "injury" or "injustice" as the thing that is their opposite and that they together work to diminish. Her recent book – Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing between Democracy and Doom – shows that nuclear weapons and governance (particularly democratic governance) are mutually exclusive; it specifies the constitutional tools available for dismantling the country’s nuclear architecture.

Elaine Scarry was elected to the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has received honorary degrees from Northwestern University in the United States and Uppsala University in Sweden, as well as the Truman Capote Award for literary criticism, and most recently, the Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2005, Prospect Magazine and Foreign Policy named her one of the top 100 leading intellectuals.

This event is co-sponsored by the McDonald Agape Foundation.