The Richardson American Studies Lecture Series
Since 1987, The Richardson American Studies Lecture Series has been fixture of intellectual life at Georgetown. With scholars, journalists, politicians, and public figures reflecting on their work in the fields of U.S. history, politics, and culture. The lecture is the highlight of the American Studies calendar and one of the most treasured lecture events hosted at Georgetown.
The Richardson American Studies Lecture Series was created through the generous gift of Mrs. Eudora Richardson C’84.
American Studies and the Old Neighborhood with Carlo Rotella (Boston College)
Thursday, April 13th, 4:30pm-6:00pm, Herman Meeting Room (HSFC)
Carlo Rotella is professor of American Studies, English, and journalism at Boston College. His books include October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature (1998), Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt (2004), Cut Time: An Education at the Fights (2005), and Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories (2012). He writes regularly for the New York Times Magazine, he has been an op-ed columnist for the Boston Globe and commentator for WGBH, and his work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, the Washington Post Magazine, Slate, the Believer, The American Scholar, American Quarterly, Critical Inquiry, the Journal of Urban History, and The Best American Essays. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, the Whiting Writers Award, the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, and U.S. State Department grants to lecture in China and Bosnia.
This year’s lecture, “American Studies and The Old Neighborhood,” asks what is a neighborhood? It’s a place—buildings, streets, the familiar landscape of home. But it’s also people who must work together to create a community that’s always both pulling together and coming apart. In his latest book, The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood, Carlo Rotella returns to South Shore, the neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago where he grew up in the 1970s, to explore how a neighborhood works and what it means to the people who live there.