Guest lecturer, Roy Sorenson - "Never Ending News" | In 1980 Ted Turner introduced a cable television channel dedicated to news. Those who grew up in the resulting era of perpetual news cannot conceive of a day without news. Has their upbringing blinded them to a possibility of a day without news? Or has their experience primed recognition of its impossibility? The focus of Sorenson's essay is an argument favoring the latter alternative: A day without news would be unprecedented – a first! Given the novelty, the absence of news would itself be news. Consequently, there cannot be a first day without news. Thus the existence of past news ensures there will always be news. This conclusion would be more newsworthy if drawn exclusively from a priori premises. Accordingly, the paper pares away superfluous empirical premises. This uncovers the hierarchical structure of news. For more information about the lecture please email dbiddle@udel.edu or visit www.philosophy.udel.edu 

Guest speaker: Sharon Block | Title: “Creating Race on Early American Bodies” | Using 4,000 descriptions of missing persons, Block’s cultural history traces how common language called race and identity into being before the rise of nineteenth-century scientific racism. In the colonial eighteenth-century, a multitude of characteristics besides skin color reified racial assumptions. Colonists discursively justified a race-based slave system not by opposing black and white, but by accumulating differences in the bodies they described. Such subtle systemization of racism naturalized enslavement into bodily description, erased Native American heritage, and privileged life histories only for people of European heritage. Block’s rereading of the eighteenth-century racial landscape offers a fine-tuned analysis of evolving notions of racial difference. | Co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center, Africana Studies, Women’s Studies, English, History, the Vice Provost for Diversity, and the University Committee on Cultural Activities and Public Events. Additional support provided by the History department’s Harrington Fund. For more information please visit http://www.history.udel.edu/