ICYMI: Watch the Recording of Tommie Shelby's Lecture

On November 11, the 2025 Presidential Lecture in the Humanities and Arts presented Harvard philosopher Tommie Shelby. His lecture examines what role intellectuals from oppressed groups should play in the struggle for their group's liberation. It draws on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Richard Wright to ask whether such intellectuals should subordinate their interest in art and ideas to political resistance against injustice. It also probes a deep tension between the characteristic dispositions of intellectuals and the demands of political solidarity, and it asks how (if at all) this tension might be resolved or lessened.