Is Reason Overrated? Rethinking the Whole History of Western Thought
Please visit https://summer.sps.columbia.edu/summer-ideas-exchange to view the live stream.
Moderated by June Cross, Emmy-award winner; Professor of Journalism and Director, Documentary Journalism Program at Columbia Journalism School
There is a growing awareness that philosophy’s past is richer and more diverse than previously understood. In this conversation, philosopher Christia Mercer and political scientist Melvin Rogers share plans to shine a light on hidden figures from the history of western philosophy and African-American political thought, and explain why rewriting them back into history is essential.
Columbia's Summer Ideas Exchange is a unique opportunity for you to engage with some of the University’s most celebrated faculty. Do you have a question for Professor Mercer or Professor Rogers? If so, we want to hear from you. You can submit your question in advance with registration or live during the event on Columbia University’s Facebook page.
About these events:
Columbia’s Summer Ideas Exchange is a series of timely and dynamic conversations featuring some of the University's most accomplished and celebrated faculty across a variety of disciplines. These intimate and thought-provoking discussions and interviews preview some of the courses and content available during Columbia’s Summer Sessions coming up in June 2020. For more information on Columbia's Summer Sessions, please visit summer.sps.columbia.edu.
Christia Mercer studied art history in New York and Rome, before going to graduate school for philosophy (PhD, Princeton University, 1989). Among other awards, she has received a Fulbright Scholarship (1984–85), Humboldt Fellowship (1993–94) and NEH Fellowship (2002). She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2012–13) and, along with Seamus Heaney, a Resident Scholar at the American Academy in Rome (Spring, 2013). Most recently, she is the recipient of an ACLS (2015–16), Folger Library Fellowship (2016), a Senior Visiting Professorship at Harvard University's Villa I Tatti Library, Florence, Italy (2015) and Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (2018-19). Mercer is proudest of her teaching awards. She won the 2008 Columbia College Great Teacher Award, and the 2012 Mark Van Doren Award, which annually recognizes a professor for “commitment to undergraduate instruction, as well as for humanity, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership.” She is also the Director of the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy. Professor Mercer has become increasingly involved in rethinking criminal justice and access to higher education. She was the first professor to teach in Taconic Correctional Facility as part of Columbia University’s Justice-in-Education Initiative. She is now organizing courses in the Metropolitan Detention Center, a Federal Prison in Brooklyn and publishes on the need to make higher education more widely available and on justice reform.
Melvin Rogers grew up in New York and was educated at Amherst College, University of Cambridge and Yale University. After holding professorships at the University of Virginia in Political Science, Emory University in Philosophy and UCLA in Political Science and African American Studies, he joined Brown University as Associate Professor in Political Science. Rogers has wide-ranging interests in democratic theory and the history of American and African-American political and ethical philosophy. He is the author of The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (2009), editor of John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (2016), co-editor of African American Political Thought: A Collected History (2020) and Oxford University Press’s “New Histories of Philosophy” book series. In addition to his academic publications, Rogers has published on contemporary issues in Boston Review, Dissent, and Public Seminar.
June Cross, a native New Yorker, is a writer and documentary producer interested in the intersection of poverty, race and politics in the United States. She is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she founded a program in journalistic documentary. Her latest film, Wilhemina’s War, about a South Carolina grandmother fighting for access to health care for her family, was nominated for a national Emmy. It premiered at DOC NYC in 2015, and aired on PBS’ Independent Lens in February 2016. She is best known for an Emmy-winning documentary about her own family, Secret Daughter: the Story of a Mixed Race Child and the Mother Who Gave Her Away, which aired on Frontline in 1996. She was an Executive Producer of the six-hour PBS series, This Far by Faith. Cross also produced “The Old Man and the Storm,” which aired on PBS’ Frontline in 2009. She has worked for CBS News and PBS’ NewsHour. She is currently working on two projects about Voter Access: one is a documentary; the other an experimental performance piece that uses documentary elements. She lives in Washington Heights with the jazz drummer Mike Clark.
For questions, please contact sps-events [[at]] columbia [[dot]] edu.