The Friday Forum invites prominent scholars into the Harvard Book Store for a spirited discussion of their recently published academic work. Forums take place at the Harvard Book Store at 3:00 p.m. and are free of charge. A book-signing follows each talk.

at Harvard Book Store
1256 Mass. Ave., Cambridge
Admission is free and open to the public.

The Fall Friday Forum Schedule

September 28
Larry Cuban
Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom

Larry Cuban is a Professor of Education at Stanford University and former president of the American Educational Research Association. In his studies of early childhood, high school, and university classrooms in Silicon Valley, Larry Cuban found that students and teachers use the new technologies far less in the classroom than they do at home, and that teachers who use computers for instruction do so infrequently and unimaginatively. Computers can be useful when teachers sufficiently understand the technology themselves, believe it will enhance learning, and have the power to shape their own curricula. But these conditions can't be met without a broader and deeper commitment to public education beyond preparing workers. More attention, Cuban says, needs to be paid to the civic and social goals of schooling, goals that make the question of how many computers are in classrooms trivial.

October 5
Harry Gelber
Nations Out of Empires

Harry Gelber examines centuries of colonial interaction and argues for a close link between revolution in 18th-century Europe and the development of Asian nationalism from the 19th century onwards. He reviews how the adoption of European industrial and financial practices encouraged the spread of European ideologies in general. Asia's adoption of national self-determination and decolonization changed the balance of international power.

Harry G. Gelber is Professor of History and Political Science and Visiting Research Fellow at the Asian Research Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science.

October 12
Hazel Rowley
Richard Wright: The Life and Times

"Writing," Richard Wright once said, "is my way of being a free man." In this authoritative and engaging biography, Hazel Rowley chronicles Wright's extraordinary journey from a sharecropper's shack in Mississippi to international renown as a writer, fiercely independent thinker, and outspoken critic of racism. The child of the fundamentalist South with an eighth-grade education, a self-taught intellectual in the working-class Communist Party of the 1930s, a black man married to a white woman, and an expatriate in France after World War II, Wright was always an outsider. Skillfully interweaving quotations from Wright's writings, Rowley portrays a man who transcended the times in which he lived and sought to reconcile opposing cultures in his work. She draws on recently discovered material to shed new light on Wright's relationships with Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and others, and on his self-imposed exile in France (widely blamed for his so-called decline as a writer). In this lively, finely crafted narrative, Wright -- passionate, complex, courageous, and flawed -- comes vibrantly to life.

Praise for Richard Wright
"Riveting...In Hazel Rowley's incisive and engrossing appreciation of a literary career spanning two continents, Richard Wright now has a biography that takes full measure of the significance of his celebrated, tortured, volcanic passage." -- David Levering Lewis, author of W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, and W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963, winners of the 1994 and 2001 Pulitzer Prizes for Biography.

"Hazel Rowley's Richard Wright is all that one can reasonably hope for in a biography, and yet so much more. Tirelessly, imaginatively researched and elegantly written, it examines this enigmatic native son with an exacting but also finely sympathetic eye. The result is a portrait of uncommon penetration and skill -- surely one of the finest literary biographies to appear in many a year." -- Arnold Rampersad, Professor, Stanford University, and author of The Life of Langston Hughes

Hazel Rowley is the author of Christina Stead: A Biography, a New York Times notable book. She has taught at the University of Iowa and at Deakin University in Melbourne and was a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe College. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

October 19
Emily Dalgarno
Virginia Woolf and the Visible World

In Virginia Woolf and the Visible World, Emily Dalgarno examines Woolf's engagement with notions of the visible. Dalgarno examines how Woolf's writing engages with visible and nonvisible realms of experience, and draws on ideas from the diverse fields of psychoanalytic theory, classical Greek tragedy, astronomy, photography and photojournalism. Dalgarno offers textual analyses of Woolf's individual works, including To the Lighthouse, The Waves and Three Guineas arguing for the importance of her ongoing interest in Greek translation.

Emily Dalgarno is a Professor of English at Boston University, who has also taught at l'Université Paul Valéry in Montpellier. She has published articles on Conrad, Faulkner, Lawrence and Woolf, among others.

October 26
Martha Nussbaum
Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions

new venue! Emerson Hall, Room 305
co-sponsored by the Harvard Department of Philosophy

In this wide-ranging book, based on her Gifford Lectures, philosopher Martha Nussbaum draws on philosophy, psychology, anthropology, music and literature to illuminate the role emotions play in our thoughts about important goals. Starting with an account of her own mother's death, she argues that emotions are intelligent appraisals of a world that we do not control, in the light of our own most significant goals and plans. She then investigates the implications of this idea for normative issues, analyzing the role of compassion in private and public reasoning and the attempts of authors both philosophical and literary to purify or reform the emotion of erotic love.

Martha Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago, appointed in Law School, Philosophy department, and Divinity School, and an Associate in Classics

November 2
Peggy Levitt
Transnational Villagers

Contrary to popular opinion, increasing numbers of migrants continue to participate in the political, social, and economic lives of their countries of origin even as they put down roots in the United States. Transnational Villagers offers a detailed, compelling account of how ordinary people keep their feet in two worlds and create communities that span borders. Peggy Levitt explores the powerful familial, religious, and political connections that arise between Miraflores, a town in the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood in Boston and examines the ways in which these ties transform life in both the home and host country.

Peggy Levitt is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College and an Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University.

November 9
Lawrence Buell
Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond

The environmental imagination does not stop short at the edge of the woods. Nor should our understanding of it, as Lawrence Buell makes powerfully clear in his new book that aims to reshape the field of literature and environmental studies. Emphasizing the influence of the physical environment on individual and collective perception, his book thus provides the theoretical underpinnings for an ecocriticism now reaching full power, and does so in remarkably clear and concrete ways.

Writing for an Endangered World offers a conception of the physical environment--whether built or natural--as simultaneously found and constructed, and treats imaginative representations of it as acts of both discovery and invention. A number of the chapters develop this idea through parallel studies of figures identified with either "natural" or urban settings: John Muir and Jane Addams; Aldo Leopold and William Faulkner; Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Dreiser; Wendell Berry and Gwendolyn Brooks. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, but ranging freely across national borders, his book reimagines city and country as a single complex landscape.

Lawrence Buell is John P. Marquand Professor of English, Harvard University, and the author of The Environmental Imagination (Harvard).

November 16
Kay Lehman Schlozman and Sidney Verba
The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender, Equality, and Political Participation

Why, after several generations of suffrage and a revival of the women's movement in the late 1960s, do women continue to be less politically active than men? Why are they less likely to seek public office or join political organizations? The Private Roots of Public Action is the most comprehensive study of this puzzle of unequal participation.

The authors develop new methods to trace gender differences in political activity to the nonpolitical institutions of everyday life -- the family, school, workplace, nonpolitical voluntary association, and church. Different experiences with these institutions produce differences in the resources, skills, and political orientations that facilitate participation -- with a cumulative advantage for men. In addition, part of the solution to the puzzle of unequal participation lies in politics itself: where women hold visible public office, women citizens are more politically interested and active. The model that explains gender differences in participation is sufficiently general to apply to participatory disparities among other groups -- among the young, the middle-aged, and the elderly or among Latinos, African-Americans and Anglo-Whites.

Kay Lehman Schlozman is Professor of Political Science, Boston College. Sidney Verba is Carl. H. Pforzheimer University Professor, Harvard University. Nancy Burns (not speaking) is the Henry Simmons Frieze Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan.

November 30
Alfred Tauber
Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing

In his graceful philosophical account, Alfred I. Tauber shows why Thoreau still seems so relevant today -- more relevant in many respects than he seemed to his contemporaries. Although Thoreau has been skillfully and thoroughly examined as a writer, naturalist, mystic, historian, social thinker, Transcendentalist, and lifelong student, we may find in Tauber's portrait of Thoreau the moralist a characterization that binds all these aspects of his career together.

Thoreau was caught at a critical turn in the history of science, between the ebb of Romanticism and the rising tide of positivism. He responded to the challenges posed by the new ideal of objectivity not by rejecting the scientific worldview, but by humanizing it for himself. Tauber portrays Thoreau as a man whose moral vision guided his life's work. Each of Thoreau's projects reflected a self-proclaimed "metaphysical ethics," an articulated program of self-discovery and self-knowing. By writing, by combining precision with poetry in his naturalist pursuits and simplicity with mystical fervor in his daily activity, Thoreau sought to live a life of virtue--one he would characterize as marked by deliberate choice. This unique vision of human agency and responsibility will still seem fresh and contemporary to readers at the start of the twenty-first century.

Alfred I. Tauber is Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Medicine, and Director of the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. Among his previous books are Confessions of a Medicine Man (1999) and The Immune Self: Theory or Metaphor? (1994).

December 7
Elizabeth Wanning Harries
Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale

Grounded firmly in social history and set in lucid prose, Twice upon a Time refocuses the lens through which we look at fairy tales. Conteuses, storytelling women in France in the 1690s, saw their tales as amusements for sophisticated adults in the salon, not for children. Self-referential, frequently parodic, and set in elaborate frames, their works often criticize the social expectations that determined the lives of women at the court of Louis XIV.

After examining the evolution of the "Anglo-American" fairy tale and its place in this variegated history, Harries devotes the rest of her book to recent women writers -- A. S. Byatt, Anne Sexton, Angela Carter, and Emma Donoghue among them -- who have returned to fairy-tale motifs so as to challenge modern-day gender expectations. Late-twentieth-century tales, like the conteuses', force us to rethink our conception of fairy tales and of their history.

Elizabeth Harries is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Smith College.