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
- 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”