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Speakers: 2010-2011
Leon Botstein
- Presidential Lecturer 2010-11
President of Bard College; Music Director of the American Symphony Orchestra [+]Leon Botstein has been president of Bard College since 1975. He received his B.A. degree with special honors in history from the University of Chicago and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in European history from Harvard. The author of Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture, he has been a pioneer in linking American higher education with public secondary schools. Dr. Botstein has been the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra since 1992 and was appointed the music director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the orchestra of the Israel Broadcast Authority, in 2003. He is the founder and an artistic director of the Bard Music Festival, now in its twenty-first year. A member of the American Philosophical Society, Dr. Botstein has received the Carnegie Corporation Academic Leadership Award, the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Harvard University's Centennial Award, and the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art.
To view videos and read more about Leon Botstein, visit the Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts website.
Marjorie Garber
- William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University [+]Marjorie Garber is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, and Chair of the Program in Dramatic Arts. She has served as Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, Chair of the department of Visual and Environmental Studies, and Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. A member of the Board of Directors of the American Council of Learned Societies and a Trustee of the English Institute, she is the former President of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, and a continuing member of its board. She has published fifteen books and edited seven collections of essays on topics from Shakespeare to literary and cultural theory to the arts and intellectual life. Shakespeare After All (Pantheon, 2004) received the 2005 Christian Gauss Book Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
Newsweek magazine chose Shakespeare After All as one of the five best nonfiction books of 2004, and praised it as the "indispensable introduction to an indispensable writer ... Garber's is the most exhilarating seminar room you'll ever enter."
Her most recent book from Pantheon is Shakespeare and Modern Culture (Pantheon, 2008). She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Geoffrey Harpham
- President, National Humanities Center [+]Geoffrey Galt Harpham is president and director of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, the only institute for advanced study in the world dedicated exclusively to the humanities. He was trained as a literary scholar, but his work has encompassed a wide range of topics and fields.
Among his many books are On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (1982); Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (1999); and Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity (2002). His longstanding scholarly interests include the role of ethics in literary study, the place of language in intellectual history, and the work of Joseph Conrad. He has collaborated with M. H. Abrams on A Glossary of Literary Terms, now in its tenth edition.
In recent years, he has become a prominent historian of and advocate for the humanities; The Humanities and the Dream of America appeared in 2011. He has received fellowships from the J. S. Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Under his leadership, the National Humanities Center has sponsored initiatives that have encouraged dialogue between the humanities and the natural and social sciences.
Cathy Horyn
- Arts Critic in Residence 2010-11
Fashion Critic, The New York Times [+]Cathy Horyn has been the fashion critic of The New York Times since 1999. She has a blog "On the Runway," and she also covers the industry for The New York Times Magazine. Prior to joining the Times, she was a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where she wrote profiles of many entertainers and also contributed articles about the fashion and music industries. She has also written for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and a number of European publications. From 1990 to 1994, she was the fashion reporter for The Washington Post. She began her career in 1980 at the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia.
A native of Coshocton, Ohio, she graduated from Barnard College in New York City, and has a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.
Judith Jamison
- Presidential Lecturer, 2010-11
Artistic Director, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater [+]Judith Jamison is one of the foremost figures in American dance. She was appointed Artistic Director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in December 1989 at the request of her mentor, Alvin Ailey, who personally chose her to succeed him before his untimely death. A native of Philadelphia, Jamison studied with Marion Cuyjet, was discovered by Agnes de Mille and made her New York debut with American Ballet Theatre in 1964. She became a member of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1965 and danced with the Company for 15 years to great acclaim. Recognizing her extraordinary talent, Mr. Ailey created some of his most enduring roles for her, most notably the tour-de-force solo, Cry.
After leaving the Company in 1980, Ms. Jamison appeared as a guest artist with ballet companies all over the world and starred in the hit Broadway musical Sophisticated Ladies. In 1988, she formed her own company, The Jamison Project; a PBS special depicting her creative process, Judith Jamison: The Dancemaker, aired nationally the same year.
To view videos and read more about Judith Jamison, visit the Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts website.
Tim O'Brien
- Raymond F. West Memorial Lecturer 2010-11
Winner of the National Book Award [+]The author of eight books, Tim O’Brien received the National Book Award in Fiction in 1979 for his novel Going After Cacciato. In 2005 The Things They Carried was named by the New York Times as one of the twenty best books of the last quarter century. It received the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award in fiction and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The French edition of The Things They Carried received France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, and the title story was selected by John Updike for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. In the Lake of the Woods, published in 1994, was chosen by Time magazine as the best novel of that year. The book also received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was selected as one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times. In 2010, O’Brien received the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for a distinguished body of work. O’Brien’s other books include If I Die in a Combat Zone, Northern Lights, Tomcat in Love and July, July. His short fiction, which received the National Magazine Award, has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic, Esquire, Playboy, Harper’s, Granta, and several editions of The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories.
Robert Putnam
- Presidential Lecturer 2010-11
Visiting Professor and Director of the Graduate Programme in Social Change, University of Manchester [+]Robert D. Putnam is the Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard, and Visiting Professor and Director of the Graduate Programme in Social Change, University of Manchester (UK). Raised in a small town in the Midwest and educated at Swarthmore, Oxford, and Yale, he has served as Dean of the Kennedy School of Government. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the British Academy, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and past president of the American Political Science Association. He was the 2006 recipient of the Skytte Prize, the most prestigious international award for scholarly achievement in political science. The London Sunday Times has called him “the most influential academic in the world today.”
He has written a dozen books, translated into twenty languages, including the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and Better Together: Restoring the American Community, a study of new forms of social connectedness. His Making Democracy Work was praised by the Economist as "a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto and Weber." Both Making Democracy Work and Bowling Alone rank among the most cited publications in the social sciences worldwide in the last half century.
Putnam has worked on these themes with Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, as well as with British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Ireland’s Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi, and many other national leaders and grassroots activists around the world. He founded the Saguaro Seminar, bringing together leading thinkers and practitioners from across America to develop actionable ideas for civic renewal.
His earlier work included research on political elites, Italian politics, and globalization. Before coming to Harvard in 1979, he taught at the University of Michigan and served on the staff of the National Security Council. He is currently working on four major empirical projects: (1) the changing role of religion in contemporary America, (2) strategies for social integration in the context of immigration and ethnic diversity, (3) the effects of workplace practices on family and community life, and (4) growing class disparities among American youth.
Ruth Reichl
- Author, restaurant critic, former editor-in-chief, Gourmet Magazine [+]Author, restaurant critic, former Editor-in-chief of Gourmet Magazine, and host of PBS’ Gourmet’s Adventures with Ruth, Ruth Reichl has been a treasured voice on the culinary landscape for many years, zealously guiding us about how to cook, what to eat, and where to eat. The Seattle Times called her "one of the nation's most influential figures in the food world."
Born and raised in New York City, Reichl moved to Berkeley, California, where she played an integral part in America’s culinary revolution as chef and co-owner of The Swallow Restaurant. She eventually went on to become food editor for theLos Angeles Times, and for six years, restaurant critic for The New York Times. She was editor-in-chief of Gourmet Magazine from 1999 until the magazine's closure in 2009.
Since then, she has authored the critically acclaimed New York Times bestsellers Garlic and Sapphires, in which she recounts her adventures in restaurant reviewing for The New York Times, her memoir Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table, For You, Mom, Finally and Comfort Me With Apples.
Reichl hosted Eating Out Loud, three specials on The Food Network covering New York, San Francisco, and Miami. On PBS’ new series, Gourmet’s Adventures with Ruth, Reichl spans the globe, visiting cooking schools around the world. She has been honored with four James Beard Awards as well as numerous awards from the Association of American Food Journalists, and the YWCA Elizabeth Cutter Morrow Award.