Fall 2025 Event Series
Please check the details of each event for format and location. All events, as always, are free and open to the public.
Don't Say No: The Musical Lives of Alicja Trout
- Opening and Reception
- Saturday, September 6, 1-2:00pm
- Art Museum of the University of Memphis
- Convenient parking in the Innovation Drive Garage
Alicja Trout joined her first band in Memphis in 1997, and for over 30 years she has played music, toured the U.S. and Europe, recorded albums, and managed her own record label.
She's also been a tireless documenter of the music and arts scenes she's helped create. This exhibit provides a visual illustration of Trout's career through her own private collection of posters, flyers, and promotional materials.
The opening reception will be on September 6, from 1-2pm, with light refreshments. The exhibit runs from September 6 through October 25.
“The Declaration of Independence Today: Why an Old Text Still Serves us Now” 
Danielle Allen // Harvard University
Thursday, September 18
6:00PM
McNeill Concert Hall, Rhodes College
The event is free. Register here.
Danielle Allen’s award-winning book Our Declaration closely reads this crucial document to uncover its rich intellectual legacy, blending the best of humanities methods and disciplines as she crafts a moving memoir in defense
of equality.
It is Difficult to Get the News from Poems: Close Reading and Artificial Intelligence
Dan Sinykin // Emory University
Naseeb Shaheen Memorial Lecture Series
- Thursday, September 26
- Reception: 5:30pm // Lecture: 6:00pm
- Maxine Smith University Center River Room
- Convenient parking in the Zach Curlin Lot
The modernist poet William Carlos Williams wrote that "men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found" in poetry. What, exactly, did he mean by that? To find out, we must close read the text. Close reading treats text as art, not as content, or information, or as a set of facts to learn for some other purpose. We study art because it is good to study art: it keeps us, per Williams, from dying miserably.
Every day, AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to produce more of the world's writing. Which means that every day more writing that humans read—and that other LLMs use to ‘learn’—was created through probabilistic prediction rather than the complicated process we refer to as ‘human thought.’ This talk will make a case for why it matters more than ever to understand why the humanistic practice of ‘close reading’ is worth doing, and why we should want to be intrinsically motivated to do it.
Dan Sinykin is Winship Distinguished Research Professor of English at Emory University. He is the author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (Columbia, 2023), and, with Johanna Winant, is the editor of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, 2025).
This event is co-sponsored with the Department of English.
"Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom"
Frederick Knight // Howard University
Belle McWilliams Lecture Series
- Thursday, November 6, 2025
- 5:30pm Reception // 6:00pm Lecture
- Maxine Smith University Center River Room (UC 342)
Dr. Knight will explore the pivotal role that elders played in African American families and communities through Reconstruction. Drawing on a wide range of printed and archival materials from the period, he will also examine how black and white Southerners used competing ideas about age to forge kinship, community, and freedom over the nineteenth century.
Frederick Knight is an expert on early African American and African Diaspora history. He is the author of Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom (Penn Press, 2024), which argues that elders were central to African American community formation through Reconstruction. The book also demonstrates how whites and blacks mobilized competing ideas about age to exercise power from the era of slavery through the period of emancipation in the United States. His first book Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850 (NYU Press, 2010) traces how Africans, though carried across the Atlantic against their wills, drew upon knowledge from their homelands to shape the agricultural and material worlds of New World slave labor camps. He has published scholarly articles and book chapters on black history, and his work has appeared in the Journal of Negro History, the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, The History Transactions of Ghana, Early American Studies, the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, and The Conversation.
