HSS 50th Anniversary Lecture
John Sutherland is a British academic, author, literary reviewer, and newspaper columnist who is one of the world's leading authorities on British Victorian fiction. He is known for his highly successful nonacademic books on literary history and the pleasures of reading. Sutherland returns to HSS, where he was on the faculty from 1983 to 1992, as part of the lecture series commemorating the division's 50th anniversary.
Abstract
If Caltech has a founding father it is astronomer George Ellery Hale. If there was a moving spirit behind the Henry E. Huntington Library, Hale can claim a large part of that distinction, as well. The remarkable openness of Hale's mind and vision has left monuments throughout Southern California and, in the undergraduate curriculum of Caltech, an educational legacy: something that could be called the ideal of the "humane scientist." Hale believed in the undivided intellect.
The image which best expresses that belief is the "Round Table" lunches at the Athenaeum, at which colleagues from all divisions sit and talk across their specialisms. At the classroom level, Caltech turns out more rocket scientists capable of discussing Jane Austen or Shakespeare than any of its rival institutions. How, this lecture will ask, has the Hale vision prospered over the decades and where, in 2016, is it now?
To read more and watch a recording of this lecture, please visit: http://www.hss.caltech.edu/content/caltechs-humanities-and-social-sciences-division-hosts-lecture-series