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Barbara Aronstein Black Lecture Series (Fall 2004)

• September 23, 2004
• October 11, 2004

September 23, 2004

Anita Allen
Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law
University of Pennsylvania Law School

"Why Aren't We Better?": America's New Ethics Scene

Jerome Greene Hall 101
4:30 PM

Prof. Allen's lecture, taken from her new book The New Ethics: A Guided Tour of the Twenty-first Century Moral Landscape (Miramax, 2004), looks at the nation's moral health as well as presents a practical guide for staying afloat in a time of ethical ambiguity.

Prof. Allen explores the moral problems posed by new technology, including designer babies and cosmetic surgery, capital punishment, financial fraud, and questions of honesty and dissimulation in sports, business, and politics.

Prof. Allen's interest in ethics began early, as a junior high student she integrated her school. She later earned a BA from New College in Sarastoa, Florida and an MA/PhD in philosophy from the University of Michigan. After receiving her law degree from Harvard, she practiced at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York. She was the first African-American woman on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh and the first to teach philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. Currently, she is a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.

October 11, 2004

Valerie Smith
Director, Program in African-American Studies
Professor of Literature
Princeton University

Narratives of Race in the 'Post-Civil Rights' Era

In Conjunction with Columbia Law School's Brown v. Board of Education 50th Anniversary Celebration

Jerome Greene Hall 101
4:30 PM

When asked about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., most people simply recall the phrase "I have a dream." What is the affect on our understanding of history to reduce people to icons: a collection of catch phrases and awards? Advocating for a more nuanced understanding of the Civil Rights movement and its players, Prof. Smith maintains that this shorthand method of talking about the past "makes us complicit with an act of cultural amnesia, perpetuated in the name of memorialization." Prof. Smith, currently working on a book about the Civil Rights movement and memory, argues that how we remember historical events and figures says as much about the present as it does the past.

Prof. Smith is the Director of the Program in African American Studies and Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton University. She is a specialist in African American literature and culture, with specific interests in black feminist theory and film studies. A native of Brooklyn, she did her undergraduate work at Bates College and received a doctorate from the University of Virginia.