All upcoming Lectures

On April 15, 2019, the world watched as Notre-Dame de Paris withstood a devastating fire. But the great Gothic cathedral itself has watched over its city for nearly a thousand years, from the beginning of its construction in 1163 to the French Revolution when its statues of kings were beheaded to witnessing the adversities of World War II. With its reopening scheduled for December, Met Cloisters curator emerita Barbara Drake Boehm traces the history of this monument through times of turbulence and triumph.

Discover the world’s deadliest caterpillars; a butterfly that shares its world with polar bears at one extreme and penguins at the other; and screaming moths that can jam the sonar of predatory bats. Wildlife documentary filmmaker Steve Nicholls looks at why it seems there’s no end to the tricks that evolution has come up with as it turned the Lepidoptera into one of the most successful of all insect groups.

Considered the most influential art school of the 20th century, the Bauhaus lasted merely 14 years, from 1919 to 1933.  Art historian Erich Keel traces the pressures that led to its formation, the changing aesthetic philosophies that guided the teaching of subjects as varied as architecture, weaving, and typography, and the inevitable exposure to political headwinds that questioned both the existence of a progressive art school and the very idea of a liberal republic following the defeat of Germany in World War I. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

Anxiety is usually thought of as a pathology, but some philosophers argue that anxiety is a normal, even essential, part of being human, and that coming to terms with this fact is potentially transformative. Philosophy professor Samir Chopra explores valuable insights about anxiety from ancient and modern philosophies, including Buddhism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory.

Painting on the cusp of the medieval and Renaissance worlds, Hieronymus Bosch continues to fascinate with his fantastic imagery and densely symbolic compositions. Even after decades of research and close examination, many of his masterpieces remain as perplexing as they probably appeared to their original viewers. Art historian Aneta Georgievskia-Shine discusses ways of approaching the unique vision of reality and human nature contained within Bosch’s painted worlds. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

In the late 1950s, having already won lasting fame as a novelist, John Steinbeck was seized by a powerful urge to return to a longtime dream: contemporizing Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d' Arthur. Public humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson offers a fascinating look at the book that became the critically dismissed The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights and Steinbeck’s quest to give new life to Malory and use the tales of King Arthur as a medium for his own expression.

The COVID-19 pandemic won't be our last, says biological anthropologist Sabrina Sholts of the National Museum of Natural History, because what makes us vulnerable to pandemics also makes us human. Drawing on her new book, The Human Disease: How We Create Pandemics, from Our Bodies to Our Beliefs, Sholts travels through history and around the globe to examine how and why such pandemics and many other infectious disease events are an inescapable threat of our own making.

Delve into Gen. George McClellan’s 1862 Peninsula Campaign with an emphasis on the Seven Days Battles. Evaluating McClellan’s actions and state of mind, Civil War tour guide Marc Thompson explains why this bold campaign plan yielded disastrous results.

Drawing on his new book The Demon of Unrest, Erik Larson examines the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter—a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Using information from diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson discusses the five months that led to the start of the Civil War—a slow-burning crisis that finally tore a deeply divided nation in two.

Are you feeling like it’s impossible to repair our ailing democracy and the mechanisms that power it? Math holds the key to creating an infrastructure that benefits everyone, says math professor Ismar Volić. Presenting mathematical thinking as an objective, nonpartisan framework, Volic explains why the current voting system stifles political diversity and the Electoral College must be rethought—and suggests what can work better.