Tanner Lectures to Focus on Beauty and Justice

Harvard University Professor Elaine Scarry will deliver the 1998 Tanner Lectures on March 25 and 26 at 4 p.m. in the auditorium of the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St. The talks will focus on “Beauty and its Relation to Justice.” The first lecture is titled “On Beauty and Being Fair”; the second, “On Beauty and Being Wrong.” Both are free and open to the public.

Scarry, the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, joined the Harvard faculty in 1989 as professor of English and American literature. Her work gained national prominence with the publication of “The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World” 1986 , an interdisciplinary study of the representation of violence and pain in literary texts, aesthetic theory, political philosophy, science and medicine. Since that time, Scarry has lectured and written on a wide range of issues, synthesizing aesthetics, science and the law in a framework for cultural analysis.

Scarry is author of “Resisting Representation” 1994 and “Making Mental Pictures Fly” forthcoming, 1998 , and editor of “Literature and the Body: Selected Papers from the English Institute” 1988 and “Fins de Siecle: English Poetry in 1590, 1690, 1790, 1890, 1990” 1994 . She is currently working on “The Matter of Consent,” an account of the structural attibutes common to consent in aesthetics, medicine, political philosophy and law, as framed through the problem of absence of consent in the development and use of nuclear arms.

Among Scarry’s awards and honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Center Fellowship and a Levenson Award for Undergraduate Teaching at Harvard. Scarry is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as a Senior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. She was a Leff Fellow at Yale Law School in 1993 and delivered the Luce Lectures at Yale in 1986.