Spring 2025 events & announcements
Friends supporter program, Tanner Lecture in Human Values and Symposium, Fellows’ Works-in-Progress talks
Become a Friend of the Tanner Humanities Center
The Tanner Humanities Center is grateful for the contributions of our donors. Your generosity supports our public programming, student programming, and research fellowships.
We invite you to become a Friend of the Tanner Humanities Center through annual contributions at the Bronze, Silver, Gold, or Platinum level.
University of Utah students can also become Friends at no cost.
Tanner Humanities Center events
Tanner Conversation with Isabel Moreira
Author of Balthild of Francia: Anglo-Saxon Slave, Merovingian Queen, and Abolitionist Saint
Thursday, February 13, 4:00pm,
Tanner Humanities Center, Jewel Box, CTIHB Room 143
Tanner Talk: Becoming a Birder: Immersion in the True Reality, by Ed Yong
Author of An Immense World
Tuesday, February 25, 7:00pm,
Utah Museum of Fine Arts
Tanner Conversation with Paul Reeve
Author of This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah
Tuesday, March 4, 12:00pm,
Tanner Humanities Center Jewel Box, CTIHB Room 143
Tanner Conversation with Louis Chude-Sokei
Author of Floating in a Most Peculiar Way
Tuesday, April 1, 7:00pm,
Salt Lake City Public Library
Tanner Lecture on Human Values and Symposium — April 9–10, 2025
Tanner Lecture on Human Values,
David Damrosch
Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature
Director, Institute for World Literature
Harvard University
A Rune of One’s Own: Writing Systems and Cultural Memory
When writing systems spread beyond their language of origin, they bring literacy to formerly oral cultures or intrude on an existing system of writing. The process of learning a new script often entails learning about the source culture and its literature, sometimes overwriting earlier local traditions, other times creatively stimulating them. This lecture will explore the idea of scriptworlds through the interplay of runes and the Roman alphabet after Iceland’s conversion to Christianity in the year 1000. How did Icelandic poets and grammarians take advantage of the new writing technology to record previously oral traditions and to work against the loss of cultural memory threatened by the new alphabetic order?
Wednesday, April 9, 7:00pm
Utah Museum of Fine Arts
Tanner Lecture Symposium
12:00pm — Keynote address
David Damrosch “Language Wars: Scriptworlds in Collision”
The displacement of runes in medieval Iceland was a gradual and largely peaceful process, but changes can be imposed, either by an imperial power or, conversely, by a nation seeking to free itself from an imperial scriptworld. This lecture will begin with biblical writers’ resistance to Babylonian culture, and then turn to modern examples, focusing on the changing scripts in colonial and revolutionary Vietnam and “the catastrophic language reform” in Turkey during the 1920s. Closing with the role of scripts in civil and regional conflicts in the Balkans and in Israel/Palestine, the lecture will lead into a symposium featuring young scholars exploring “language wars” in the contexts of East Asia and the Middle East.
1:30pm — Panel I: East Asian Scriptworlds in Collision
Ashton Lazarus (University of Utah)
“The Middle Path: Wa/Kan Hybridity in Twelfth-Century Buddhist Popular Songs”Will Hedberg (Arizona State University)
“Scratching an Itch Through the Sole of One’s Shoe: Script, Translation, and the Illegible in Early Modern Japanese Fiction”Cindi Textor (University of Utah)
“(Mis)Translation and the Crisis of Colonial Korean Literature: Illegibility in Kim Saryang’s ‘Deep in the Grass’”Raja Adal (University of Pittsburgh)
“The Global Script Regime: Foray into a World History of Scriptworlds”
3:00pm — Panel II: Middle Eastern Scriptworlds in Collision
Jordan Johansen (University of Utah)
“Egyptian Hieroglyphs as a Symbolic Scriptworld”Annie Green (University of Utah)
“‘The New Script (al-khatt al-jadid)’: Transforming Arabic into the Language of Modernity?”Liron Mor (University of California, Irvine)
“Scripting Disappearance: Erasure as Conflict in Palestine-Israel”Rawad Wehbe (University of Utah)
“Poetry under Occupation: Arab Poets Writing Across Scriptworlds”
4:30pm — Closing remarks
Thursday, April 10, 12:00pm–5pm
Gould Auditorium, Marriott Library
Work-in-progress presentations by fellows of the Tanner Humanities Center
Jewel Box, Room 143 — Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building - CTIHB (map)
Call 801-581-7989 for ADA accommodation.
40 minutes, followed by a 20-minute Q&A.
Talks begin promptly at 12:00 noon.
Thursday, January 23: Jake Nelson, Communication
Wednesday, January 29: Brandon Render, History
Wednesday, February 12: Jessie Chaplain, Communication
Thursday, February 20: Christopher Miller, Honors College
Thursday, February 27: Lindsey Webb, English
Thursday, March 6: Alexis Christensen, World Languages & Literature
Thursday, March 27: John Harfouch, Philosophy, University of Alabama in Huntsville
Thursday, April 3: Megan Weiss, Mormon Studies
Tuesday, April 8: Ataya Cesspooch, Environmental Humanities
Thursday, April 17: Therese de Raedt, World Languages & Literature