Eugene lang college the new school for liberal arts names bell hooks first scholar-in-residence

Groundbreaking author, activist, and public intellectual will take part in public events, master classes, faculty workshops, and more

NEW YORK – OCTOBER 2, 2013 -- This fall, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts welcomes author and radical thinker bell hooks for a weeklong residency, featuring classes, seminars, and public events. The residency will run from November 4 to November 8.

For more than three decades bell hooks has received international recognition as a scholar, poet, speaker, and author. She has written critically acclaimed, widely read, and influential books and articles on feminism, spirituality, race, and class. She has appeared in documentary films, and she has been celebrated as one of our nation’s leading public intellectuals by The Atlantic Monthly, as well as one of Utne Reader’s “100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life.” bell hooks is a charismatic speaker who divides her time among teaching, writing, and lecturing around the world.

On Tuesday, November 5, hooks will be in conversation with fellow activist and author Eve Ensler, whose work The Vagina Monologues has been instrumental in raising consciousness around issues of the female body, and given rise to V-Day, a global movement dedicated to ending violence against women and girls. On Friday, November 8, hooks and Melissa Harris-Perry, a professor at Tulane University and host of MSNBC’s weekly political analysis program Melissa Harris-Perry, will discuss the power and role of black women’s voices in shaping public discourse.

“I am deeply honored to invite my colleague and friend bell hooks to our community given her commitment to education as the practice of freedom,” said Lang Dean Stephanie Browner. “Her work resonates with people from all walks of life. bell gracefully moves between different yet deeply interconnected subjects, from politics to love, race to spirituality, gender to lived bodies.”

“New York City has long been of great importance to my work,” said hooks. “The diversity of people, arts, politics, and expression the city makes possible has always nurtured my writing and my thinking.” She looks forward to her week-long residency at The New School, an institution, she says, “that also has a commitment to education as liberation.”

About bell hooks
When Gloria Jean Watkins published her first book, And There We Wept, in 1978, she released it under the name “bell hooks” for two reasons. The first was to honor her maternal grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, whom she has described as being “known for her snappy and bold tongue.” Secondly, and more broadly, the name and its lower-case written form serves to de-emphasize the author as person and instead focus the reader’s attention on the subject of her writing.

hooks’ writing, dozens of books and articles published across five decades, has dealt with numerous topics, and encompasses several genres, including cultural and political analyses and critiques, personal memoirs, poetry collections, and children’s books. One prominent theme in her work has been education. She has called for an approach to learning that nurtures “radical critical consciousness.” “To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn,” she wrote in 1994’s Teaching to Transgress. “The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility.”

About Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts
Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts is a seminar-style liberal arts college located in New York City that was established in 1985. Remaining faithful to its founding philosophy, Eugene Lang College grew out of a highly progressive freshman-year program developed at The New School in 1973. Lang offers intensive liberal arts study as well as a faculty committed to teaching undergraduates in an interdisciplinary context. Areas of study include religious studies, urban studies, social inquiry, interdisciplinary science, culture and media, literary studies, the arts, philosophy, psychology, economics, environmental studies, and education studies. For more information, visit www.lang.newschool.edu.

About The New School
Founded in 1919, The New School was born out of the principles of academic freedom, tolerance, and experimentation. Committed to civic engagement and social justice, The New School today remains in the vanguard of innovation in higher education, with more than 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students challenging the status quo in design and the social sciences, liberal arts, management, the arts, and media. The New School welcomes thousands of adult learners annually for continuing education courses and a calendar of lectures, screenings, readings, and concerts. Through its online learning portals, research institutes, and international partnerships, The New School maintains a global presence. Learn more at www.newschool.edu.

###

COMMUNICATIONS AND EXTERNAL AFFAIRS

PRESS RELEASE

Media Contacts:

Chris Chafin
212.229.5667 x3794
[email protected]