About the 2007-2008 Lectures
The University of California, Berkeley will host the prestigious Tanner
Lectures on Human Values, a three-day event to be held from April 8
to April 10, 2008.
The lectures and the seminar are free and open to the public.
Watch the Interview Online
Conversations with History Interview (UCTV)
Lecture Schedule
Pandora's Boxes, or How We Store Our Values
Lecture I: How We Do Things with Abstract Nouns:
Bacon, Locke, Williams
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
4:10 p.m. – 6:30 p.m., Toll Room, Alumni House
With commentary by J.B. Schneewind
Lecture II: American Keywords: Marriage, Success, and Democracy
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
4:10 p.m. – 6:30 p.m., Toll Room, Alumni House
With commentary by Geoffrey Nunberg and Lorna Hutson
Seminar and Discussion with commentators
Thursday, April 10, 2008
4:10 p.m. – 6:30 p.m., Toll Room, Alumni House
With commentary by J.B. Schneewind, Geoffrey Nunberg,
and Lorna Hutson
About Annabel Patterson
Annabel Patterson is renowned for having stretched our understanding
of "Literature" further than most. Having begun as a student
of English Renaissance poetry, she soon moved into rhetoric (Hermogenes
and the Renaissance, 1970); the history of censorship (Censorship
and Interpretation, 1984); the reception of classical texts (Pastoral
and Ideology, 1987); historiography (Reading Holinshed's Chronicles,
1994); and especially early modern political thought (Shakespeare
and the Popular Voice, 1989; Early Modern Liberalism, 1997;
and Nobody's Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History, 2002).
Her interests in portraiture, book illustration, and the history of
the press inform several of these works. She constantly returns to Andrew
Marvell, whose own work bears on several of these themes. In press is
The Long Parliament of Charles II, which developed out of the
important Yale edition of Marvell's Prose Works (2003), of which
Patterson was editor-in-chief. As these Tanner lectures will attest,
she has now moved on to American issues.
Born in England, Patterson emigrated to Canada in 1957. There, she
enrolled at the University of Toronto, where her B.A. received the highest
prize, the Governor General's Gold Medal. She received her M.A "with
distinction", and her Ph.D. from the University of London in 1963
and 1965 respectively. Since then she has taught at Toronto, York University,
the University of Maryland at College Park (another emigration), and
Duke University. She moved to Yale's English Department in 1994, and
was made Sterling Professor in 2001. She was elected a Fellow of the
Academy of Arts and Sciences in the year 2000. Other distinctions include
the Harry Levin Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association
for Pastoral and Ideology, the John Ben Snow Prize (a historian's prize
of the North American Conference on British Studies) for Reading Holinshed's
Chronicles, a Senior Fellowship at the Cornell Society for the Humanities
in 1981, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984, a Mellon Fellowship at the
National Humanities Center in 1991, and, most recently, a Mellon Emeritus
Fellowship.
About the Commentators
J.B. Schneewind
Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus,
Johns Hopkins University
J.B. Schneewind is a prominent scholar in the field of philosophy,
focusing on the history of ethics, ethical theory, Immanuel Kant, and
British empiricism. He is best known for his work in the history of
modern moral philosophy. Schneewind's current work continues to focus
on Kant and the history of autonomy.
Schneewind's first publication was Backgrounds to English Victorian
Literature (1970), after which he published Sidgwick's Ethics
and Victorian Moral Philosophy (1977). Since then he has written
various articles on ethics and the history of moral thought, including
essays on Locke, Montaigne, and Kant for the Cambridge Companion
series. He also contributed to the Cambridge History of Eighteenth
Century Philosophy. He edited a two-volume anthology, Moral Philosophy
from Montaigne to Kant (1990), and followed it with a study of the
moral thought of the period, The Invention of Autonomy: a History
of Modern Moral Philosophy (1998). Among his edited volumes are
Giving: Western Idea of Philanthropy (1996), Kant: Lectures
on Ethics (1997), and Teaching New Histories of Philosophy
(2005).
Schneewind is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University,
where he taught from 1981-2003. He received his B.A. from Cornell University
in 1951, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1953 and
1957, respectively. Among his many academic positions he has taught
at the University of Chicago, Princeton University, University of Pittsburgh,
Hunter College, Stanford University, University of Leicester, University
of Helsinki, and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. He is a
past president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical
Association and past Chair of the APA Board. He has received fellowships
from the Guggenheim Foundation in 1967, the Mellon Foundation in 1963,
and from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in
1992.
Geoffrey Nunberg
Adjunct Full Professor, School
of Information, University of California, Berkeley
Geoffrey Nunberg is a leading scholar in linguistics. He focuses on
semantics and pragmatics, information access, language structure, multilingualism
and language policy, and the cultural implications of digital technology.
He has contributed extensively to contemporary thought on language,
both in scholarly publications and in the general media.
Nunberg publications include The Linguistics of Punctuation
(Chicago, 1990), "The Places of Books in the Age of Electronic
Reproduction" (Representations, 1993), "Will Libraries
Survive?" (The American Prospect, 1998), The Way We Talk
Now (2001), and Going Nucular (2004). His work has also appeared
frequently in the Week in Review section of the Sunday New York Times.
For the past twenty years, Nunberg has done a regular language commentary
on the NPR program Fresh Air.
Nunberg serves as an adjunct full professor at the School of Information
at the University of California, Berkeley. Nunberg received his B.A.
from Columbia University, his M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania,
and his Ph.D. from the City University of New York. He has taught at
UCLA, the University of Rome, and the University of Naples. Until 2001,
Nunberg was a principal scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center,
working on the development of linguistic technology.
Lorna Hutson
Berry Professor of English Literature,
University of St. Andrews, Scotland
Lorna Hutson is a distinguished scholar of English Renaissance literature,
whose interests currently focus primarily on the forensic and legal
underpinnings of Renaissance poetic fiction. She is particularly interested
in the theoretical aspects of feminism, the history of sexuality, rhetoric,
historicism, and law, as they relate to the literary works of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Hutson has contributed valued insights on
Renaissance literature and drama. She contextualizes the literature
and draws on her research of the history, culture, and law of early
modern England to produce new understandings of such works.
Hutson has published numerous articles in literary periodicals and
contributes frequently to the journal Representations, of which she
serves on the editorial board. She is also the author of multiple books,
including The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare
and Renaissance Drama (2007), The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship
and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (1994), Feminism
and Renaissance Studies (1999), and Rhetoric and Law in Early
Modern Europe (2001). Hutson has also edited Ben Jonson's Discoveries
(1641) for the forthcoming Cambridge Complete Works of Ben Jonson.
In 2004, Hutson was appointed the Berry Professor of English Literature
at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She received her B.A.
First Class Honors in English Literature and her D.Phil. from Oxford
University in 1979 and 1983, respectively. Hutson served as Professor
of English at University of Hull, England from 1998-2000, and as Professor
of English at the University of California, Berkeley from 2000-2004.
Also in 2004, she was awarded a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation
to write The Invention of Suspicion, now published by Oxford.
