Tuesday, February 21
3:30-5:00 p.m.
McKenzie 375

The Work of Wisdom in a Catastrophic World

This lecture explores how a variety of mid-20th century American intellectuals navigated the demands of contemplation and the rewards of the interior life with their felt obligations to intervene on the major social and political issues of their day.  

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen is the Merle Curti and Vilas-Borghesi Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she researches and teaches U.S. thought and culture in transatlantic perspective. She is the author of American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2021), The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History (Oxford, 2019), and American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago, 2012), and is currently at work on a history of ideas about—and the quest for—wisdom in 20th-century U.S. history.