One of the most famous stories about the development of literary and critical theory in the United States has its origin at Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus about half a century ago.
It was at “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” symposium held at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library in October 1966 that a then relatively unknown French thinker named Jacques Derrida threw a wrench into a few of the central ideas supporting structuralism, a linguistic methodology for understanding and conceptualizing human culture dominant at the time and epitomized by luminaries such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, and Roland Barthes. What’s often forgotten about that event is that it was in fact the inaugural conference organized by Johns Hopkins University’s Humanities Center, an academic department that celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.
Hopkins Humanities Center celebrates 50 years as home to a diverse intellectual community
Congratulations to Richard Macksey on 50 years!!
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Cheers for the Humanities Center (my alma mater!) and our beloved, esteemed, and charismatic leader, Richard Macksey. His wit, erudition, and endless curiosity have inspired me for–almost–fifty years. May we all have at least another fifty!
Amen to Macksey comments by Emily Toth and Chris Aldrich. RM was my mentor at JHU — 40 years later he lovingly mentored my daughter.
❤️