UTHC Distinguished Lecture Series: Ed Pavlić

The UT Humanities Center’s Distinguished Lecture Series bring acclaimed humanities scholars and renowned artists to the Knoxville campus for research-based conversations with UT faculty and graduate students and to give a public talk on a topic of the speaker’s choosing. Speakers are nominated and hosted by faculty from our nine affiliated arts and humanities departments. Because only speakers with exceptional records of publication and research activity are eligible to recieve a nomination as a visiting scholar, the program brings to campus some of the most cutting-edge and prolific intellectuals in the humanities today.nnOn November 21, Ed Pavlić, distinguished research professor of English, Africana Studies, and creative writing at the University of Georgia, will give a talk on Non-Violence, Black Power, and the Citizens of Pompeii: James Baldwin’s 1968. nnThe lecture is free and open to the public and is held on the UT Knoxville campus. Public parking is available in the Volunteer Hall parking garage for our off-campus visitors. Everyone is welcome!nnAbout the talk:nnRadicalization for James Baldwin meant moving from the idea that experience was an essentially individual endeavor to the understanding of experience as a mutual reality. For a writer who had made his career in the 1950s among New York intellectuals who premised the idea of freedom–as well as artistic achievement–in individual terms as part of American and Western Cold War propaganda efforts, this shift in Baldwin’s thinking, writing, and living involved intense negotiations and confrontations at every level of his life. This talk traces Baldwin’s career of radicalization beginning in 1963 and culminating in the tumultuous year of 1968.nnAbout the speaker: nnEd Pavlić is author of more than a dozen books written across and between genres, including: Call It In the Air (2022), a documentary lyric; Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes (2021), an itinerary across the poet’s full career in poems; Another Kind of Madness (2019), a novel set in contemporary Chicago and coastal Kenya; and Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners (2016), an exploration of Black music’s many roles in Baldwin’s life and work. Pavlić is currently at work on two books: No Time to Rest: The Four Lives of James Baldwin, a narrative of Baldwin’s career for the 21st century, and Like I Was Ink, a memoir of racially non-binary experience. Pavlić is currently Distinguished Research Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Georgia.nnPavlić was invited to UT by Amy Elias, professor of English and director of the UT Humanities Center.