feb
1
2011

Common as Air

Lewis Hyde, Berkman Center Faculty Associate & Professor at Kenyon College

 


Tuesday, February 1, 7PM
Humanities Center at Harvard / Barker Center, Thompson Room (Map)
Free and open to the public; RSVP required for those attending in person to Amar Ashar (ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event is co-hosted with the Humanities Center at Harvard University
Food and drink will be served

Lewis Hyde, Berkman Center Faculty Associate & Professor at Kenyon College, will discuss his new book, "Common as Air."

Response by Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard.

About Lewis

Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. His 1983 book, The Gift, illuminates and defends the non-commercial portion of artistic practice. Trickster Makes This World (1998) uses a group of ancient myths to argue for the kind of disruptive intelligence all cultures need if they are to remain lively, flexible, and open to change. Hyde is currently at work on a book about our “cultural commons,” that vast store of ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past and continue to produce.

A MacArthur Fellow and former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde teaches during the fall semesters at Kenyon College, where he is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing. During the rest of the year he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Links

• Robert Darnton's review of Common as Air in the New York Times
• Mike Linksvayer's review on the Creative Commons website
• Ward Sutton's review / Salon.com slideshow
  

Headshot image via Doc Searls