For immediate use
UNC-Chapel Hill Douglass Hunt Lecture features nationally-known writer and political theorist on college free speech
Thursday, April 14, program at Sonja Haynes Stone Center is free and open to the public
(Chapel Hill, N.C. – April 7, 2016) – The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Carolina Seminars 2016 Douglass Hunt Lecture Series is featuring Danielle Allen, Ph.D., political theorist, writer and director of Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, who will speak about the current challenges on college campuses working to honor both free speech and the need for safe space.
Allen’s speech – Difference without Domination: Reconciling Free Speech and Social Equality on College Campuses – questions if it is possible to reconcile free expression and an egalitarian campus culture, which are often seen as competing commitments. Allen concludes that it is possible as institutions work to re-cast arguments about the first amendment, offensiveness and safe spaces.
The Thursday, April 14, lecture will be held in the Hitchcock Multipurpose Room of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center at 5:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
A 2015 Macarthur “Genius Grant” recipient, Allen has published broadly in democratic theory, political sociology and the history of political thought. She was Dean of the Division of Humanities at the University of Chicago and a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study before joining the Harvard faculty. She is a contributing writer for The Washington Post.
Widely known for her work on justice and citizenship in both ancient Athens and modern America, Allen is the author of The World of Prometheus: the Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (2000), Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown vs. the Board of Education (2004), Why Plato Wrote (2010), and Our Declaration (2014). She is co-editor (with Rob Reich) of Education, Justice, and Democracy (2013).
The program is co-sponsored by the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies, Department of Political Science, Department of Sociology, Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Institute of African American Research, and the Parr Center for Ethics.
For additional information, please contact Carolina Seminars Director, Andrew Perrin, andrew_perrin@unc.edu
-Carolina-
About the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the nation’s first public university, is a global higher education leader known for innovative teaching, research and public service. A member of the prestigious Association of American Universities, Carolina regularly ranks as the best value for academic quality in U.S. public higher education. Now in its third century, the University offers 77 bachelor’s, 113 master’s, 68 doctorate and seven professional degree programs through 14 schools and the College of Arts and Sciences. Every day, faculty – including two Nobel laureates – staff and students shape their teaching, research and public service to meet North Carolina’s most pressing needs in every region and all 100 counties. Carolina’s more than 308,000 alumni live in all 50 states and 150 countries. More than 167,000 live in North Carolina.
About the Douglass Hunt Lecture Series
The Carolina Seminars program organizes the Douglass Hunt lectures. The events are free and open to the public. On the occasion of the first Douglass Hunt Lecture, which was held on October 23, 1995, Chancellor Paul Hardin recognized the contributions of Douglass Hunt to the University and to higher education, “Douglass Hunt always was and still remains enormously useful to the University of North Carolina. Indeed, he can’t help being useful because his close association with the University and the trust he earns daily by his life and work and friendships combine to inspire all of us who are influenced by him to redouble our own efforts to be useful to our beloved University.”
Carolina Seminars contact: Amatullah King, (919) 962-2501, kingamat@email.unc.edu
Communications and Public Affairs contact: Michael John, (919) 445-8360, Michael.john@unc.edu