Co-hosted by the journal of cultural criticism The Point, the panel will consider the role of the intellectual in the public sphere. Hearing from academic and non-academic sources alike, the discussion will not only ask what intellectuals are for, but what bearing that has on the production of ideas at institutions of higher learning like Yale.
About Natasha Lennard
Natasha Lennard is a journalist, columnist and essayist. She is a contributing writer for The Intercept and her work has appeared regularly in The Nation, Esquire, The New York Times, and The New Inquiry, among others. Her first book, Violence: Humans in Dark Times (with Brad Evans) was published by City Lights Books in 2018. Her second book, Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life, will be published by Verso Books in May 2019. She teaches critical journalism at the New School for Social Research.
About Jesse McCarthy
Jesse McCarthy is assistant professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is an editor at The Point magazine, and his writings on race, literature, politics and music have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Harvard Magazine, The Nation, n+1 and Dissent.
Ben Wurgaft is a writer and historian whose interests include modern European intellectual history and philosophy, the history and anthropology of science, and food history. His book Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt (Penn, 2016) explores the effects of publicness on philosophy in the mid-20th century; his forthcoming book, Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food (California, 2019) explores the strange phenomenon of laboratory-grown meat and asks what makes it imaginable in the early 21st century.