"A Call to Wonder: From Angels and Armless Calligraphers to Ordinary Marvels"
Tuesday, February 10th, 4:45 PM
AD White House, Guerlac Room
Abstract
Wonder is a premodern affect that art from a wide range of genres and periods evokes from his viewers. This presentation offers a working definition of wonder as moral emotion called up for purposes extending from didactic instruction, warning and scolding, entertainment and profit, to ethical inquiry. Accounts of wonder also draw from philosophers and historians of modernity and its antecedents, often characterized as periods of enchantment and disenchantment. The historical arc of appeals to wonder from the premodern into our present era yields an archive of vivid images, texts, and objects with much cultural authority and moral claim. The presentation gathers and reads compelling images that call us to wonder.
Biography
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is professor emerita of English and bioethics at Emory University. Her expertise in disability bioethics, critical disability studies, and health humanities brings disability culture, ethics, and justice to a broad range of institutions and communities. She is a Hastings Center Fellow and senior advisor, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is co-editor of About Us: Essays from the New York Times about Disability by People with Disabilities and author of Staring: How We Look and several other books.
