This highlight reel features some of the most interesting speakers who have visited The Graduate Center at the City University of New York.
Bio
John Corigliano
The American John Corigliano continues to add to one of the richest, most unusual, and
most widely celebrated bodies of work any composer has created over the last forty years.
Corigliano's scores, now numbering over one hundred, have won him the Pulitzer Prize, the Grawemeyer Award, three Grammy Awards, and an Academy Award and have
been performed and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and
chamber musicians in the world.
Attentive listening to this music reveals an unconfined imagination, one which has taken traditional notions like "symphony" or "concerto" and redefined them in a uniquely transparent idiom forged as much from the post-war European
avant garde as from his American forebears.
Daniel Dennett
Dr. Daniel Dennett received his B.A. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1963, and earned his Doctorate in Philosophy at Oxford University in 1965. After teaching at U.C. Irvine for six years, Dennett joined the faculty at Tufts University in 1971, where he is now a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.
Dennett has written extensively about the mind, consciousness, and evolution. He published his first book, Content and Consciousness, in 1969 and is perhaps best known for his 1995 book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which explores the implications of natural selection on humanity's place in the universe. He has also published more than one hundred scholarly articles in professional journals, ranging from Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today.
Susan Jacoby
Susan Jacoby is the author of Never Say Die and The Age of American Unreason. She began her writing career as a reporter for The Washington Post, and has been a contributor to a wide range of periodicals and newspapers for more than 25 years on topics including law, religion, medicine, aging, women's rights, political dissent in the Soviet Union and Russian literature.
Jacoby has been the recipient of grants from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2001-2002, she was named a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Jacoby's other books include Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004); Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1984, and Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search for Her Family's Buried Past.
Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, author, and filmmaker. Her first book, the international bestseller No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, was translated into twenty-eight languages and called "a movement bible" by The New York Times.
She writes an internationally syndicated column for The Nation and The Guardian and reported from Iraq for Harper's Magazine. In 2004, she released The Take, a feature documentary about Argentina's occupied factories, co-produced with director Avi Lewis.
She is a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics and holds an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws degree from the University of King's College, Nova Scotia.
Colin McGinn
Colin McGinn (B.Phil., Oxford University), joined the University of Miami Philosophy Department in 2006, having taught previously at University of London, University of Oxford, and Rutgers University. He was the recipient of the John Locke Prize at Oxford University in 1973. His research interests are in philosophy of mind (particularly consciousness, intentionality and imagination), metaphysics, ethics and philosophical logic.
He has published many articles, and is the author of 20 books, including Mental Content (Blackwell, 1989), The Problem of Consciousness (Blackwell, 1991), The Character of Mind (Oxford 1997), Ethics, Evil and Fiction (Oxford 1997), The Mysterious Flame (Basic Books, 1999), Logical Properties (Oxford 2000), Consciousness and Its Objects (Oxford, 2004), Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning (Harvard, 2004), and Shakespeare's Philosophy (Harper, 2006).
Thomas E. Ricks
Thomas E. Ricks is a Washington Post Pentagon and military correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winner.
Ricks lectures widely to the military and is a member of Harvard University's Senior Advisory Council on the Project on U.S. Civil-Military Relations. Ricks is the author of the bestselling books Making the Corps, A Soldier's Duty, and Fiasco: The American Military Adventure In Iraq.
Mary Robinson
Mary Robinson is President of Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative, in partnership with the Aspen Institute, Columbia University and the International Council for Human Rights Policy.
Robinson served as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002 and as President of Ireland from 1990 to 1997. Before her election as President, she served as Senator, holding that office for 20 years.
Educated at Trinity College in Ireland, Robinson holds law degrees from the King's Inns in Dublin and from Harvard University. She is Chair of the Council of Women World Leaders, Vice President of the Club of Madrid, honorary President of Oxfam International, a board member of the GAVI Fund Board and Chair of the GAVI Fund Executive Committee, and a member of the Leadership Council of the UN Global Coalition on Women and AIDS.
She co-chairs the Health Worker Global Policy Advisory Council.
Patti Smith
Patti Smith is a singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist, who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album, "Horses." Called the "Godmother of Punk", she integrated the beat poetry performance style with three-chord rock. Smith's most widely known song is "Because the Night," which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen and reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978.
In 2005, Patti Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, and in 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
Joseph E. Stiglitz is a professor at Columbia University and the chair of the university's Committee on Global Thought. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information. He was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers under Clinton and later the chief economist for the World Bank. His latest book is Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy.
David Sloan Wilson
David Sloan Wilson uses evolutionary theory to explain all aspects of humanity in addition to the rest of life, as he recounts for a general audience in Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives (Bantam 2007). He is a distinguished professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University, part of the State University of New York.
He publishes in anthropology, psychology, and philosophy journals in addition to his mainstream biological research. His academic books include Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (with Elliott Sober, Harvard 1998), Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago, 2002), and The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (co-edited with Jonathan Gottschall, Northwestern 2005). Wilson also directs EvoS, a campus-wide program that uses evolutionary theory as a common language for the unification of knowledge.
(born Feb. 9, 1943, Gary, Ind., U.S.) U.S. economist. He received a Ph.D. (1967) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and taught at several universities, including Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia. From 1997 to 2000 he was the World Bank's chief economist but often disagreed with the organization's policies. Stiglitz helped found modern development economics, and he changed how economists think about the way markets work. His studies on asymmetric information in the marketplace showed that the poorly informed can obtain information from the better informed through a screening process, for example, when insurance companies determine the risk factors of their clients. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with George A. Akerlof and A. Michael Spence.
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