Thursday, December 2, 1999
5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Bartos Theater
MIT Media Lab
20 Ames Street
Abstract
This forum
aims to explore the ways in which academic ideas have been disseminated
to the public in recent years and how (or whether) this has
changed the professional priorities and research of scholars.
It was designed to continue the discussion started in the prior
forum Beyond the Ivory
Tower.
Speakers
Gerald
Early is the Merle Kling Professor Modern Letters
and the Director of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington
University in St. Louis. He is the author of One Nation Under
Groove: Motown and American Culture, Daughters: On Family
and Fatherhood and The Culture of Bruising: Essays on
Prizefighting, Literature and Modern American Culture which
won a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Alan
Lightman is the John Burchard Professor of Humanities
and senior lecturer in physics at MIT. He is the author of two
novels, Einstein's Dreams and Good Benito. His
third novel, The Diagnosis, will be published next year.
His non-fiction titles include Origins: the Lives and Worlds
of Modern Cosmologists (with R. Brawer), Ancient Light:
Our Changing View of the Universe and the forthcoming new
edition of Great Ideas in Physics.
Steven
Pinker is Professor of Cognitive Science and Director
of the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT.
He is the author of How the Mind Works and The Language
Instinct. His research includes both empirical studies of
linguistic behavior and theoretical analyses of the nature of
language and its relation to mind and brain.
Papers
[The draft manuscript of a book-in-progress
titled Beyond
the Ivory Tower
with contributions from Gerald Early, Alan Lightman and Steven
Pinker
is also available online.]
Gerald Early,
Partisanship, Race, and the Public Intellectual
[3,470 words, posted january 5, 2000]
Alan Lightman,
The Role of the Public Intellectual
[1,856 words, posted january 5, 2000]
Steven
Pinker,
Some Remarks on Becoming a "Public Intellectual"
[1,590 words, posted january 5, 2000]
