ANNAPOLIS, MD  [August 19, 2024] — St. John’s College has announced its Fall Formal Lecture Series. On Friday evenings, members of the St. John’s College community gather in the Francis Scott Key Auditorium to hear a lecture or performance from visiting scholars, artists, poets, or faculty. Lecturers include members of the St. John’s College faculty—known as tutors—and professors from notable universities across the country. Each lecture is followed by a question period and an engaging discussion between the lecturer and attendees.

“We encourage all of our friends, alumni, students, faculty, and staff to mark these events in their calendars,” says St. John’s College President Nora Demleitner. “The range of subjects, topics, and creativity these events offer is significant, and we are pleased to present them to our Annapolis community at no charge.”

All lectures begin at 7:30 p.m. on Fridays at St. John’s College, Mellon Hall, Francis Scott Key Auditorium, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401, unless otherwise noted. Lectures are free and open to the public; however, seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis.

“In the St. John’s classroom, students and faculty converse together about fundamental questions. In the Friday night lecture, we get to hear a longer account from someone who has thought deeply about the topic,” says dean of the college Susan Paalman. “The question period after each lecture is an important part, as it sparks a conversation amongst the whole community.”

The fall 2024 lectures and performances are:

• August 23: Dean Susan Paalman will deliver the Christopher B. Nelson Lecture, “The One and the Many in Psalm 42: Sicut cervus.”
• August 30: Tutor Nicholas Bellinson will deliver his lecture “Madness/Enchantment: Don Quixote and the contest of the real.”
• September 13: Graham Harman (A90), Professor of Philosophy at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCIA), will deliver his lecture “Footnotes to Aristotle.”
  • The title of this lecture is a riff on Alfred North Whitehead’s famous remark that Western philosophy can be considered as a series of footnotes to Plato. The lecture will interpret the difference between Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics as a difference between the continuous and the discrete and will seek to develop further Aristotle’s notion of “contact” as how two things meet (thereby bridging the gap between the continuous and the discrete).
• September 18: Maxwell Stearns, Venable, Baetjer & Howard Professor of Law, University of Maryland Carey School of Law, will deliver the St John’s College and Carey School of Law Constitution Day Lecture, “Yes, we’re still in a constitutional crisis, and Parliamentary America remains our best hope.” Note: This lecture will be held on Wednesday, September 18, in the Great Hall and streamed live.
  • The United States is in a constitutional crisis that threatens our capacity to continue as a democracy. Although many commentators agree, few properly diagnose the root cause—two-party presidentialism—leading to inadequate remedies. In Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing our Broken Democracy (JHU Press 2024), Professor Maxwell Stearns pulls no punches. He explains how a system we managed for nearly a quarter millennium has gone off the rails in the information age, and he provides a set of bold solutions that, in contrast with popular alternatives, can end the crisis and be enacted.
• September 20: Ryan Shea, The Nature Institute, will deliver his lecture “Phenomenology of Nature.”
  • Edmund Husserl inaugurated the modern discipline of phenomenology with the rallying cry, “back to the ‘things themselves.’” And yet, when reading the works of phenomenologists, one might reasonably worry that we have bracketed the natural world, that we have left out precisely the “things themselves.” This talk pursues two distinct, yet intertwined, questions. We begin with Socrates’s central question (ti esti), “What is phenomenology? ” This leads to our central concern, “How might we practice a phenomenology of nature? ”The work of the poet, scientist, painter, and dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe will serve as a guiding light.
• September 27: Tutor Zena Hitz will deliver her lecture “What’s wrong with history?”
• October 11: Ellwood Wiggins, Assistant Professor of German, University of Washington, will deliver his lecture “The Ethics and Aesthetics of Sympathy in Sophocles’s Philoctetes.”
  • The plot of Sophocles’ Philoctetes turns on the experience of sympathy, which is often given credit for the moral education of Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son. Yet is this emotion a reliable force for good? Sophocles’ tragedy is a perfect proving ground to explore this question, and to test Aristotle’s description of compassion in the Rhetoric.
• October 18: Cynthia (Thia) Keppel (A84), Associate Director for Physics, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, will deliver her lecture “On Physics.”
• October 25: Gregorian Choir of Paris
  • More than music, Gregorian chant represents a vibrant thread in the tapestry of European cultural tradition—a form of expression and prayer intertwined with history.
• November 1: Bret Davis, Professor and Higgins Chair in Philosophy, Loyola University, will deliver his lecture “Self-knowledge.”
• November 8: Allen Speight (A84), Professor of Philosophy and Director of Graduate Admissions, Department of Philosophy, Boston University, will deliver his lecture “On Cave Art.”
• November 15: Stephanie Nelson (A83), Department of Classical Studies at Boston University and visiting Annapolis tutor, will deliver her lecture “Aristophanes’ Clouds and the Power of Logos.”
• November 22: Parker Quartet
  • Grammy Award-winning Parker Quartet has distinguished itself as one of the preeminent ensembles of its generation, dedicated purely to the sound and depth of their music.
• December 6: The King William Players present Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

ABOUT ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE

St. John’s College is the most distinctive liberal arts college in the country due to our interdisciplinary program, in which 200 of the most revolutionary great books from across 3,000 years of human thought are explored in student-driven, discussion-based classes for undergraduates, graduates and life-long adult learners. By probing world-changing ideas in literature, philosophy, mathematics, science, music, history, and more, students leave St. John’s with a foundation for success in such fields as law, government, research, STEM, media, and education. Located on two campuses in two historic state capitals—Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico—St. John’s is the third-oldest college in the United States and has been hailed as the “most forward-thinking, future-proof college in America” by Quartz and as a “high-achieving angel hovering over the landscape of American higher education” by the Los Angeles Times. Learn more at sjc.edu.

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MEDIA CONTACT:

Sara Luell, Senior Director of Communications and Operations, sara.luell(at)sjc.edu