A lecture series titled “Situating the Humanities” will be held at Brown this fall. It is, the poster says, “a series of lectures highlighting new and provocative work across the humanistic disciplines. The series addresses issues of ethics, aesthetics, cultural translation, and the fate of reading to engage critically pressing problems confronting humanitstic inquiry today.” Here’s the list of lectures, some of them more directly relevant to us here than others:

• Monday, Sept. 13. “The History of the Book and the History of Literature,” Seth Lerer, Stanford University
• Monday, Sept. 27. “Politics and the Aesthetics of Culture,” Michael Steinberg, Cornell University
• Thursday, Sept. 30. “The Fort-Da of Old Age: Cyberspace, Televisiual Space, Psychic Space,” Kathleen Woodward, University of Washington
• Monday, Oct. 4. “The Ethics of Close Reading,” Jane Gallop, University of Wisconsin
• Tuesday, Oct. 12. “Taxonomy and the Translation of Culture: The Case of the Arabic Yoga Text,” Carl Ernst, University of North Carolina
• Monday, Oct. 18. “The Humanities and the War on Terror,” Marc Redfield, Claremont Graduate University
• Monday, Oct. 25. “Wordsworth’s Empire,” David Simpson, UC Davis

All lectures take place at 5pm in the Crystal Room, Alumnae Hall, Brown Universtiy. Alumnae Hall is accessible from Meeting Street, half a block from the corner of Thayer.