Celebrating Gary Saul Morson: Humanistic Traditions in Russian Thought and Literature
Northwestern University, Evanston, April 19–20, 2024
The second annual conference of the Northwestern University Research Initiative in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought (NU RPLRT Research Initiative) will be held at Northwestern University on April 19–20, 2024. The conference, Celebrating Gary Saul Morson: Humanistic Traditions in Russian Thought and Literature, will honor a preeminent scholar, searching public intellectual, and beloved Northwestern University professor.
Gary Saul Morson is the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University, where he has taught since 1986. In 1995 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books include The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s “Diary of a Writer” and the Traditions of Literary Utopia; Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in “War and Peace”; Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (co-authored with Caryl Emerson); Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time; “Anna Karenina” in Our Time: Seeing More Wisely; Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us (co-authored with Morton Schapiro); and, most recently, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter.
Papers are invited on any aspect of Morson’s rich oeuvre and wide-ranging interests in Russian thought and literature and in the “perennial questions” of human existence. In addition to formal papers, other forms of participation are welcome, including roundtables, talking points, or conversation. We request that you confirm attendance via email by January 1, 2023 and submit paper abstracts by January 15, 2024. Please write to Susan McReynolds (s-mcreynolds@northwestern.edu), Randall Poole (rpoole@css.edu), or Bradley Underwood (bradleyunderwood2025@u.northwestern.edu).