Rice University

Sewall Hall, Room 301.

Timothy Williamson, Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, is this year's Lone Star Tourist.

“Properties, Individuals, and Contingency”
Tuesday, March 11
5:00 – 6:30pm, HUMANITIES 119

The Codex Judas Congress is an academic conference that will sponsor the research presentations of more than 30 world-renowned scholars to examine the newly found Tchacos Codex, a 4th Century Coptic book that contains the Gospel of Judas, the Apocalypse of James, the Letter of Peter to Philip, and a ... (more)fragment of Allogenes and Satan.

Location: Duncan Hall, Room 1055, McMurtry Auditorium

Award-winning L.A. Times journalist Sonia Nazario has spent more than two decades reporting and writing about social issues, tackling hot-button issues such as hunger, drug addiction and immigration. Next week, she will come to campus as the next speaker in Rice’s President’s Lecture Series.

Nazario ... (more)will present “Enrique’s Journey: The Odyssey of Immigrants” at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 13, in Grand Hall, Rice Memorial Center.

Room 117 Humanities Building

Women's History Month & Organization of American Historians Lecture. The OAH promotes excellence in the scholarship, teaching, and presentation of American history, and encourages wide discussion of historical questions and equitable treatment of all practitioners of history. ... (more)For more information about the OAH see www.oah.org.

The Codex Judas Congress is an academic conference that will sponsor the research presentations of more than 30 world-renowned scholars to examine the newly found Tchacos Codex, a 4th Century Coptic book that contains the Gospel of Judas, the Apocalypse of James, the Letter of Peter to Philip, and a ... (more)fragment of Allogenes and Satan.

Location: Duncan Hall, Room 1055, McMurtry Auditorium

Lecture in the Kyle Morrow Room in Fondren Library.

The event will be held in Shell Oil Auditorium in the Jones Graduate School of Management and will begin at 6 pm.

Kathleen Cleaver is a world-class human rights activist and scholar. In 1967 she became the first female member of the Black Panther Party’s Central Committee. She traveled across the ... (more)country serving as the Panther’s Communications Secretary and spokesperson, eventually organizing the historic “Free Huey” campaign on behalf of Panther’s founder, Huey P. Newton. Cleaver also spent a large part of the early 1970s in exile with her husband and Black Panther’s Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver.

In the years after her involvement with the Panthers, Cleaver has gone on to have a successful career as a gifted lawyer and educator. She currently holds positions as Senior Lecturer in Emory University’s Law School and Yale University’s African American Studies Department. She has written for a wide variety of scholarly and popular publications, and her most recent work is an edited collection of writings by Eldridge Cleaver entitled Target Zero: A Life of Writing (2006)

Cleaver’s lecture will be followed by a reception and book signing in Farnsworth Pavilion in the Rice Student Center.

Location: Farnsworth Pavilion RMC/Ley Student Center

Roméo A. Dallaire, a lieutenant general, who commanded the United Nations mission in Rwanda in 1994, will speak at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy March 25. His speech, titled "Dealing with Contemporary Genocide," begins at 7 p.m.

The cases of mass murder from the 20th century ... (more)into the 21st century have prompted a debate on the need for an effective system to prevent genocide. Dallaire will address that debate in his speech.

Before assuming the post in Rwanda, Dallaire, a highly decorated artilleryman, served in the Canadian Army in a series of increasingly demanding command, staff and training appointments. As the political situation in Rwanda deteriorated, he warned of a possible mass murder of the Tutsi minority by Hutu extremists. He witnessed unspeakable horrors and worked tirelessly to save lives as the United Nations Security Council withdrew nearly all his troops.

Dallaire retired from the Canadian Armed Forces in 2000 with the rank of lieutenant general and has received several awards for his service. He is currently a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In 2002 he was invested in the Order of Canada, one of Canada's highest honors. Dallaire presently sits in the Canadian Senate as a member of the Liberal Party of Canada.

His internationally recognized book, "Shake Hands with the Devil -- The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda," has garnered numerous international literary awards and was the basis for a full-length feature film “Shake Hands with the Devil,” released in 2007.

The March 25 event is sponsored by the Baker Institute and the Holocaust Museum of Houston. The Baker Institute's sponsorship of this event was made possible through the support of the Shell Oil Company and the Shell Distinguished Lecture Series.

For more information on the Shell Distinguished Lecture Series, visit www.bakerinstitute.org/support/shell_oil.cfm/.

Location: Fondren Library, Kyle Morrow Reading Room

Matthew Kramer, legal and political philosopher at Cambridge University, will be visiting us and discussing the objectivity of morality.

Humanities 119, 4:30pm

Humanities Building, Room 119

Heidegger and Benjamin do not only share a fundamental criticism of main-stream philosophy, but their approaches to philosophy have also much in common. This becomes most evident in their respective thoughts on language. In Benjamin’s view, language is not a means, ... (more)but rather “immediate” (unmittelbar); language, in other words,
is “magic”. In the same vein, Heidegger’s statement: “language speaks”, stipulates that language is something dynamic and self-reflexive. In both Heidegger and Benjamin,
references to theological, mythical and even occult paradigms are not scarce. This leaves the question whether a rational reconstruction of their philosophies of language would be possible.

Willem van Reijen taught social and political philosophy at the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. In 2001, he was appointed honorary professor at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Germany. Among his numerous books and articles on philosophy, social sciences and German literature are: Adorno zur Einführung (1990), Benjamin zur Einführung (1991), Horkheimer zu Einführung (1992), Allegorie und Melancholie (ed. 1992), Bürgergesellschaft, Recht und Demokratie (ed. 1995), Heilsversprechen (ed. 1997), Der Schwarzwald und Paris.
Revolutionäre Philosophie bei Heidegger und Benjamin (1998), Aufenthalte und Passagen. Leben und Werk Walter Benjamins. Eine Chronik (2001).

Location: Farsnworth Pavilion, Ley Student Center

The Arab World: History, Politics, and Culture Lecture Series
in the International Conference Facility at Baker Hall

Founder's Room Lovett Hall;
Seventh in a series of international conferences. This conference will be devoted to an examination of Judaism , Christianity and Islam, with particular sensitivity extended to the aesthetic, compositional, and performative aspects of the three faiths in their historically ... (more)appropriate media contexts.

Lecture to be held in Duncan Hall, McMurtry Auditorium. Reception to follow. Free & open to the public,

Duncan Hall, McMurtry Auditorium. Free & open to the public, reception to follow.

This talk is part of the lecture series "Museums and the Medical Humanities: The Arts of Transformation" coordinated by the HRC Collaborative Research fellow Marcia Brennan. Contact Marcia Brennan at mbrennan@rice.edu.

100 Herring Hall. Alexander Nemerov, Professor of History of Art and American Studies, Yale University.
This talk is part of the lecture series "Museums and the Medical Humanities: The Arts of Transformation" coordinated by the HRC Collaborative Research fellow Marcia Brennan. Contact Marcia Brennan ... (more)at mbrennan@rice.edu.

HUMA 119.