Humanities and Today’s World

What role can humanities play in addressing today’s global topics? After eight trans-Atlantic conversations in our series Humanities for Humans covering a wide range of pressing issues such as climate change, inequalities, and migration, we take a moment to reflect: Can humanities truly deliver in finding sustainable solutions to the myriads of challenges we face today? How do they do this? What is the importance of critical thinking, cultural awareness, empathy, human-centered and interdisciplinary approaches?

Join us and the De Gruyter Foundation at Liederkranz Club of New York City for a conversation with humanities advocates Kathryn Abrams (Law, University of California, Berkeley), Michael G. Hanchard (Africana Studies and Political Science, University of Pennsylvania), and Dagmar Herzog (History, Social Welfare, Women’s and Gender Studies, CUNY Graduate School). Moderated by Irene Kacandes (Comparative Literature, German Studies, Gender Studies Dartmouth College), editor of the newly released book Humanities for Humans: Clear Thinking on Challenging Issues (De Gruyter Brill, 2025), these esteemed scholars will share insights on the critical role of their fields in navigating today’s world.

Biographies:

Dr. Kathryn Abrams teaches feminist jurisprudence, voting rights and constitutional law at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarship has explored questions of employment discrimination, minority vote dilution, campaign finance, constitutional law, and law and the emotions, but it has focused most centrally on feminist jurisprudence. Within this area, Abrams has written on feminist methodology and epistemology, the jurisprudence of sexual harassment, and cultural and theoretical constructions of women’s agency. Before entering academia, Kathy Abrams clerked for Judge Frank M. Johnson of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. She has taught at the law schools at Boston University, Indiana University-Bloomington, Harvard University and Northwestern University. Most recently, she was Professor of Law and Associate Professor of Ethics and Public Life at Cornell University. While at Cornell, she served as Director of the Women’s Studies Program, and won several awards for teaching and for service to women. Abrams’ recent publications include “Fighting Fire with Fire: Rethinking the Role of Disgust in Hate Crimes” in the California Law Review (2002), “Subordination and Agency in Sexual Harassment Law” in Directions in Sexual Harassment Law (2003), “Extraordinary Measures: Protesting Rule of Law Violations after Bush v. Gore” in Law & Philosophy (2002), and “The Legal Subject in Exile” in the Duke Law Journal (2001).

Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she teaches on the histories of gender and sexuality, Nazism and the Holocaust, and historical methodology and theory. Publications include: Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, 2005); Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge, 2011); Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge, 2017); Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (Wisconsin, 2018); and (coedited) The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism (Routledge, 2021). Her current project, Eugenic Phantasms, considers how a focus on the theology and politics of disability in twentieth-century Germany changes how we think about racism and fascism alike.

Irene Kacandes was educated at Harvard University, Aristotle University (Thessaloniki) and the Freie Universität (Berlin). Kacandes holds the Dartmouth Professorship #2 at Dartmouth College, where she teaches in the fields of German Studies, Comparative Literature, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Jewish Studies. Author or editor of nine books, her most recent publications include Let’s Talk About Death (Prometheus, 2015) and Eastern Europe Unmapped (Berghahn, 2017). Her reflection on her paternal family’s fate in Occupied Greece, Daddy’s War (Nebraska, 2009, 2012), proposed a new genre, the paramemoir, for the study of personal material. Just released is the edited volume On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence (De Gruyter 2022). Kacandes has held a number of top positions in international professional organizations, including the presidency of the German Studies Association and of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. She also runs a book series on “Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies” at De Gruyter, Germany.

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