Humanities on the Mall: Bill Egginton in Conversation with Emma Snyder

Description

The Alexander Grass Humanities Institute is thrilled to announce the launch of its newest event series in partnership with D.C.'s East City Bookshop, Humanities on the Mall.

Join many of Johns Hopkins's own at the newly renovated building at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Beginning in Fall 2023, the Humanities on the Mall series is a place to convene stimulating conversations about lively and important ideas. This series marks an extension of the Humanities in the Village series, begun more than five years ago to bring together members of the Johns Hopkins community and its neighbors near the Homewood campus in Charles Village and beyond. Due to building security policy, all attendees will be required to sign in in order to enter the building.

To inaugurate this D.C.-based series, join the co-founders of Humanities in the Village: Humanities Institute Director Bill Egginton in conversation with Emma Snyder, owner of the Ivy Bookshop and Bird in Hand Café. Together, Egginton and Snyder will bend time, space, and even reality discussing Egginton's new book, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality (Pantheon, Aug. 2023), which explores the respective conceptions of reality in the thought of Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg. Egginton will share this new "account of how a poet, a physicist, and a philosopher pursued truth to the very limits of human apprehension and revealed the fundamental nature of our place in the universe." Staff from local independent East City Bookshop will be on-site with a pop-up store to share this book plus a great selection of related and interested further reading options. A reception will follow the conversation.

Speakers:

• William "Bill" Egginton is a professor in the humanities at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of multiple books, including How the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle in History (2007), The Philosopher's Desire (2007), The Theater of Truth (2010), In Defense of Religious Moderation (Columbia University Press, 2011), The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2016), Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (Bloomsbury, 2017) with David Castillo, The Splintering of the American Mind (Bloomsbury, 2018) and, again with David Castillo, What Would Cervantes Do? Navigating Post-Truth With Spanish Baroque Literature (McGill-Queens UP, 2022). Egginton's book for Bloomsbury's Philosophical Filmmakers series on the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and surrealist dimensions of cinematic expression in the work of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky is also due out in 2023.

• Emma Snyder is a Baltimore native who's very happy to be back home. Her favorite book is The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, which is funny and curious and meanders beautifully through the streets of New Orleans. She loves it so much that after reading it she promptly moved to Louisiana for a few years, which she didn't regret.