Join us for the inaugural lecture of the new Humanities Today Lecture Series hosted by the Halifax Humanities Society. It is also this year’s Angus Johnston Visiting Lecture sponsored by the Foundation Year Program.
Dr. Roosevelt Montás of Columbia University will present his lecture “Human, Humanity, Humanities: Reflections On Our Condition.”
The Humanities Today Series examines the role the humanities play in our lives and the lives of communities on the periphery of or excluded from the traditional avenues of humanities education.
What does it mean to be human? What do the Humanities contribute to our experience of ourselves? This talk will reflect on why the humanities are both so important and so elusive, why they are so critical to who we are, and so imperiled in our society.
Born in the Dominican Republic, Roosevelt Montás moved to the United States as a teenager and found that his early encounters with, and later study of, great books would have a profound impact on the course of his life. Dr. Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University and the former director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum (2008-2018). He is director of the Center for American Studies’ Freedom and Citizenship Program, which brings low-income high school students to the Columbia campus to study political theory and aid them in preparing successful college applications. Dr. Montás also helped to launch a branch of the Clemente Course of the Humanities—the program that inspired the creation of our own Halifax Humanities Society—and has shown a lifelong commitment to the study of the humanities.
The Halifax Humanities Society is a registered non-profit that provides educational opportunities to adults in Halifax and Nova Scotia who experience low income or other barriers to accessing traditional education. Since 2005 Halifax Humanities has been delivering programming such as Halifax Humanities 101, a great books program offered to all adults in Halifax who are facing barriers to education. The Halifax Humanities Society is excited to offer this event in collaboration with the University of King’s College as this year’s annual Angus Johnston Visiting Lecture, and supported by funds donated in the memory of Renate Usmiani, a professor of the Department of English at Mount St. Vincent University, remembered and beloved in her support for and teaching of the humanities.
