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Previous Harry C. Howard Jr. Lectures 

2022-2023

Cal Flyn, Author of Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape and Thicker Than Water: History, Secrets, and Guilt

“Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape” 

2021-2022 

David Haskell, Author of Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction; Professor of Biology at Sewanee: The University of the South 

“Sounds Wild and Broken: What Sonic Environments Teach Us about Creativity and Justice” 

2020-2021 

Majora Carter, Real Estate Developer and Urban Revitalization Strategist 

“Reimagining Cities: A Conversation with Majora Carter” with Professor Paul C. Taylor of Vanderbilt’s Departments of Philosophy and African American and Diaspora Studies, and Dominique Anderson, Affordable Housing and Social Impact Strategy Consultant for Dominique Anderson Consulting, moderated by Professor Leah Lowe, of Vanderbilt’s Department of Theatre. (video) 

2019-2020 

Jaquira Díaz, Author of Ordinary Girls: A Memoir 

“Ordinary Girls: Tacit Borders, Racialized and Gendered Violence, and the Corporeal Policing of Black and Brown Girls” 

CANCELED DUE TO COVID-19 EVENT RESTRICTIONS 

2018-2019 

Jon Parrish Peede, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities 

“The Vanderbilt Tradition and the Individual Talent” (video) 

2017-2018 

Danielle Allen, Author and James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University 

“Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A.” (video) 

2016-2017 

Quiara Alegría Hudes, Pulitzer Prize-winning Playwright 

“A Writer’s Many Selves” (video) 

2015-2016 

William Adams, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities  

“The Common Good and NEH at 50” (video) 

2014-2015 

James McBride, Author, musician and screenwriter 

The Good Lord Bird: Faith and American Slavery”  

2013-2014 

Earl Lewis, President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation  

“Three Cents, Three Senses: Philanthropy, Higher Education, and the Future” (video) 

2012-2013 

Edward L. Ayers, President and Professor of History at the University of Richmond 

“The Humanities in Our Times” (video) 

2011-2012 

Van Jones, environmental and human rights activist, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and senior policy advisor at Green for All 

“Rebuild the American Dream: Green Jobs and Beyond” (video) 

2010-2011 

David Blight, Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University 

“’Gods and Devils Aplenty’: Robert Penn Warren’s Civil War” (video) 

2009-2010 

Rosanna Warren, University Professor, Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities, and Professor of English and Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures at Boston University 

“Poems and Poem-Talk: A poetry reading and informal chat with Rosanna Warren” (video) 

2008-2009 

Roy Blount Jr., acclaimed author, humorist, and Vanderbilt alumnus (B.A. 1963) 

Through Is Thoroughly Throughsome, Go Is Wide Open, and Wince Makes You Wince: On the Non-Arbitrariness of Words” (video) 

2007-2008 

Charles S. Maier, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University 

“The Space of Nations: Territory and History before Globalization”  

2006-2007 

Helen Vendler, A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University 

“The Yeatsian Sequence: ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ and ‘Blood and the Moon.’” (audio) 

2005-2006 

Paul Freedman, Chester D. Tripp Professor of History at Yale University 

“The Allure of Spices in the Middle Ages” 

2004-2005 

Joe Klein, journalist and author 

All the King’s Men and Primary Colors: The Relationship Between Political Fiction and Political Factors in Election Year 2004” 

2003-2004 

Stephen J. Pyne, Professor of Biology and Society at Arizona State University 

“American History, with Fire in its Eye” 

2002-2003 

Kay Redfield Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Honorary Professor of English, University of St. Andrews (Scotland) 

“A Life in Moods: Personal and Professional Perspectives on Mental Illness” 

2001-2002 

  1. Carl Brown, Garrett Professor in Foreign Affairs Emeritus Princeton University

“In Search of the Middle East” 

2000-2001 

Arnold Rampersad, Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University 

“Biography and African-American Lives” 

1999-2000 

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Professor of Communication and Dean, The Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania; Director, Annenberg Public Policy Center 

“Buying Influence: Advertising and the Political Process” 

1998-1999 

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy, Harvard University 

“Liberalism in Difficulty” 

1997-1998 

Michael F. Brown, James N. Lambert 1939 Professor of Anthropology and Latin American Studies, Williams College 

“Dilemmas of the Therapeutic Society: Dispatches from the New Age and Other Places of Higher Education” 

1996-1997 

Patricia Meyer Spacks, Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English, University of Virginia 

“Arrangements of Self-Love: Boswell and Rousseau” 

1995-1996 

Lewis P. Simpson, Boyd Professor and William A. Read Professor of English Literature, emeritus, Louisiana State University 

“The Poet and the Father: Robert Penn Warren and Thomas Jefferson”