Past Avenali Lectures

While urban theorist and social commentator Mike Davis holds degrees in History from UCLA and the University of Edinburgh, his work exceeds and expands the usual definition of historical writing. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in his native Southern California.

Like Milan Kundera and Josef Škvorecký, novelist, essayist, and critic Ivan Klíma is considered one of the most important Czech writers of his time.

Opera and theatre director, teacher, and activist Peter Sellars has been a creative and deeply influential voice in the world of opera and theater for the past 30 years. Noted for his unique, contemporary stagings of both classical and contemporary plays and operas, Sellars is also professor of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA.

Natalie Zemon Davis is an important historian of the early modern period, known for her narrative writing style and her use of cross-disciplinary history, which combines history with disciplines such as anthropology, ethnography and literary theory.

Gerald Early is Professor of English and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. A noted essayist and American culture critic, Early is the author of several books, including The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, which won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.

Maurice Sendak is the author and illustrator of several noteworthy children’s books including In the Night Kitchen; Where the Wild Things Are; Outside Over There; and We’re All Down in the Dumps with Jack and Guy.

While an undergraduate in Architecture at Yale University, sculptor and architect Maya Lin won the competition to design and build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a Ghanaian philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist. His scholarship addresses political and moral theory, African intellectual history, and philosophical questions of culture and identity.

Dušan Makavejev is a Serbian film director famous for his films of former Yugoslavia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Known for blending fiction with reality and drama with humor, Makavejev’s work often contains experimental elements and has been considered controversial for its eroticism and sharp criticism of Eastern European politics.

Elaine Scarry is Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value for the Department of English at Harvard University. Her research encompasses many topics, including 20th-century Drama; the 19th-century British novel; theories of representation; language of physical pain; and the structure of verbal and material making in art, science, and the law.