Event

Mellon Distinguished Lecture Series 2014

The Mellon Distinguished Lecture Series is sponsored by the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Pennsylvania Press, the Penn Law School, the Department of History at Penn, the Perry World House, and the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism. The 2014 series runs from November 18 to 20 in the Golkin Room in Houston Hall at the University of Pennsylvania, located at 3417 Spruce St, Philadelphia, PA 19104. All lectures in the series are free and open to the public.

Christian Human Rights

Samuel Moyn
Professor of Law and History at Harvard University

Associated with the secular left after the French Revolution and in our day, universal human rights in the 1940s were to a surprising extent associated with the Christian right. These lectures explore how and why this connection developed—and its legacies in our time.

Professor Moyn, a leading expert in twentieth-century legal and intellectual history, is the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, editor of the interdisciplinary journal Humanity, and a regular contributor to The Nation and other leading journals. 

LECTURE ONE: The Secret History of Human Dignity

Tuesday, November 18, 5:00PM

The Golkin Room in Houston Hall at the University of Pennsylvania
3417 Spruce St, Philadelphia, PA 19104

The lectures begin by taking up the origins and meaning of our commitment to something called “human dignity” as the ground of our values. It takes as its point of departure the strange fact that human dignity first achieved constitutional status in Christian Ireland in 1937—not in post-Holocaust West Germany in 1949.

For more information, please visit:
http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/about/mellonlectures.html