Lectio Inauguralis "Linguistic Hospitality: Hosting Strangers"

Where: Auditorium of the Paolo Prodi Building, via Tommaso Gar 14 (Trento)
When: 11.30

An opening lecture to celebrate the academic year 2019/2020 at the Department of Humanities

• Professor Richard Kearney, Boston College, Massachusetts - USA
  Linguistic Hospitality: Hosting Strangers

Richard Kearney is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College, Massachusetts, and international director of the Guestbook Project–Hosting the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality. Professor Kearney was born in Ireland and trained in Paris, where he was a student and later a colleague of Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Stanislaus Breton and Jacques Derrida. His work is focused on diacritical hermeneutics and touches on different topics like the relation between ethics and religion, the phenomenology of images and creativity, theorizations of postmodernism, the role of narratives in relationships with the Other. In his investigations he finds coherent lines across different modes of expression like literature, the visual arts, cinema, architecture and music, and creates clear and efficient descriptions of the languages, epistemological modes and esthetic and imagination horizons that characterize our times. As a committed sociologist, Kearney was involved in the negotiations that led to the ceasefire in Northern Ireland. Some of his most notable works include: The Wake of Imagination. Toward a Postmodern Culture (1988), Poetics of Modernity: Toward a Hermeneutic Imagination (1995), On Stories. Thinking in Action (2002), Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (2003), Anatheism: Returning to God After God (2011).

The event will close with music by the University of Trento ensemble.

Students and citizens are welcome to attend.

Contacts:
staffdip.lett [at] unitn.it