Sharing Knowledge, Practicing Democracy The Promise of University-Community Collaboration in Troubled Times
Seth Moglen
Associate Professor of English
Co-Director of the South Side Initiative
Lehigh University
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
7:00 PM
Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center
2204 Erwin Road
Presented by Innovating Forms, the 2009-10 Franklin Humanities Institute Seminar
This talk is drawn from Prof. Moglen's involvement with Lehigh's South Side Initiative and a related book project on the history of Bethlehem, PA (where Lehigh is located) written in an experimental form (very short sections) that will take full advantage of the resources of scholarship but make those resources available to local community members. In particular, Moglen's goal is to share tools for understanding how racial, gender and class hierarchies develop over time and how democratic and egalitarian aspirations emerge in response to them. The project is part of a series of initiatives under his leadership at Lehigh which consist of efforts to re-conceptualize the relationship between universities and their various constituencies; he is pursuing a project of intellectual desegregation that will enable "faculty and students to share more broadly the specialized technical knowledge of the university, while at the same time enabling them to gain access to the many forms of information, culture and historical memory created in our urban community.”
Seth Moglen is the author of Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism and has also recently published a new edition of T. Thomas Fortune's Black and White: Land, Labor and Politics in the South, a neglected 19th-century classic of the African American radical political tradition. He is co-editor of Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left 30 Years On and is now working on a book entitled, Black Enlightenment: African-American Literature and Politics, 1845-1945. His scholarship focuses on American political and literary movements, drawing in rich ways on the resources of psychoanalysis.
