The Academy Distinguished Speaker Series
In spring, the Academy presents the popular Distinguished Speaker Series featuring high-profile speakers on fascinating subjects. Participation is encouraged with a Q&A after the presentations.
oin Professor Marci Shore, PhD—acclaimed historian of Central and Eastern Europe, for a compelling lecture that traces how ideas, revolutions, and lived experience collide in moments of profound political transformation. Drawing on her award-winning work on Marxism, phenomenology, and the afterlives of totalitarianism, Shore offers a uniquely intimate lens on how people search for truth and meaning amidst the ongoing upheaval of our world today.
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Professor Marci Shore, PhD, is the Chair in European Intellectual History, Supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies and Professor, at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. Professor Shore’s research focuses on the intellectual history of twentieth and twenty-first century Central and Eastern Europe.
Her books have won numerous awards. In 2018 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the book project about phenomenology in East-Central Europe tentatively titled In Pursuit of Certainty Lost: Central European Encounters on the Way to Truth: “European modernity, beginning with the Enlightenment, was an attempt to replace God, to find a grounding for truth in God’s absence.
Postmodernity, in turn, began when we gave up on replacing God and embraced groundlessness. Karl Marx was untimely when he wrote, “all that is solid melts into air.” In the mid-19th century, the observation was still premature. This is no longer the case: in a ‘post-factual’ world, much that seemed solid has melted into air. On both sides of the Atlantic, ‘post-truth’ has laid bare the end of ‘The End of History.’ Peter Pomerantsev titled his book about Putin’s Russia, “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible.” In this world, there is no longer a distinction between truth and lies. Rather, ‘everything is PR.’ Postmodernism, conceived in large part by the Left as a safeguard for pluralism and an antidote to totalizing ideologies, has today, half a century later, became a weapon of an encroaching neo-totalitarianism of the Right. The result has been what the Ukrainian philosopher Constantin Sigov describes as ‘nihilism made systematic.’”