Christopher Schaberg, PhD, examines the role of humanities in a smartphone driven society during upcoming ‘Humanities at Work’ lecture, Nov. 1.
Humanities approaches offer innovative, analytical ways of understanding phenomena, and this is a crucial phenomenon of our moment, so let’s open our intellectual tool kit and really study it.
— Nels Pearson, PhD, professor of English and director of the Humanities Institute in the College of Arts and Sciences
Distinguished scholar and author Christopher Schaberg, PhD, will reflect on the increasing pervasiveness of smartphones in a range of academic, social, and economic contexts during his upcoming lecture, “No Ideas but in Phones: Inventing the Cellular Humanities,” on Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 6 p.m. in ¶¶Òô»ÆƬapp’s Kelley Center Presentation Room. The lecture is being presented as part of the Humanities Institute’s "Humanities at Work" initiative, a series of lectures, panels, and resources that showcase the powerful and transformative role that a humanities education plays in contemporary society, civic enagement, and professional life.
In his lecture, Dr. Schaberg will draw on arguments from his most recent book, The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth, to reflect on the increasing ubiquity of smartphones in today’s society and to consider how critical humanities approaches can help us bracket and reconsider these pervasive, hyper-textual devices.
“The idea of [Dr. Schaberg’s lecture] is to show how concepts in literature, languages, philosophy, cultural study, religion, and arts can help us think creatively, critically, and even strategically about smartphone devices, which have transformed not only knowledge access, but knowledge itself,” said Nels Pearson, PhD, professor of English and director of the University’s Humanities Institute in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Humanities approaches offer innovative, analytical ways of understanding phenomena, and this is a crucial phenomenon of our moment, so let’s open our intellectual tool kit and really study it.”
Dr. Schaberg is a Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University of New Orleans and the author of multiple books in the fields of literature and culture studies. His latest book, The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth, reflects on teaching, reading, and writing in the early twenty-first century and was recently featured in .
After listening to Dr. Schaberg’s lecture, Dr. Pearson hopes that the audience will leave thinking in new ways about smartphones and their existence.
“Any event in this series is designed to address the general question ‘Why do we focus on the humanities at Fairfield, and why do they matter?’” he said. “I hope students take away perspectives that they can then use, expand on, and extend into a larger analysis of life and society and our contemporary world.”
For more information, contact Elizabeth Hastings at ehastings@fairfield.edu, or visit the Humanities at Work webpage.
