Harvard Nuclear Weapons and Torture Scholar to Speak Tonight

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Elaine Scarry, a leading scholar on violence and justice, will give a lecture titled "Beyond Torture and Nuclear Weapons: Reclaiming Our Social Contract" at 5:30 p.m. tonight in the Gearhart Hall Auditorium (GEAR 26).

Scarry is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her lecture will focus on torture and nuclear weapons, addressing the suffering of victims of torture and the checks in place to prevent nuclear warfare.

"I think she's brilliant, absolutely brilliant," said Lynda Coon, dean of the Honors College. "Scholars in a wide range of fields use her work, a breadth of influence that is most unusual."

That breadth will be on display during Scarry's visit to the U of A. In addition to her lecture she will meet with students in the honors anthropology seminar Violence and Social Suffering taught by Ram Natarajan, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. Scarry also will discuss the sonnets of Shakespeare with faculty and students in the Department of English.

Scarry teaches in the Department of English at Harvard. Her writings include The Body in Pain, On Beauty and Being Just, Dreaming by the Book, Thermonuclear Monarchy, Thinking in an Emergency and Naming Thy Name. Her essays have appeared in The Best American Essays, Harper's and The Boston Review. Scarry is also a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, and a National Book Critics Circle finalist nomination for nonfiction.

Thursday's lecture is sponsored by the Humanities Program, the Honors College, the Departments of Anthropology and English, the Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Program and the Diane D. Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society.