Join us September 27-29 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Salmagundi magazine with a three-day conference on the subject of fundamentalism in politics, morals, the arts, and education. The edited transcript of the conference proceedings will appear as a special issue of Salmagundi in the fall of 2025, precisely marking the 60th anniversary of the magazine’s founding.

The conference will extend over seven sessions, each kicked off by brief introductory remarks, but consisting mainly of continuous conversation.

Participants include: Kwame Anthony Appiah, Claire Messud, James Wood, Orlando Patterson, Darryl Pinckney, Namwali Serpell, Jesse McCarthy, Laura Kipnis, Jim Miller, Rochelle Gurstein, Susie Linfield, and others.

The conference is free and open to the public, and is part of Establish, Insure, Provide, Promote: Election 2024.

Schedule

Friday, September 27

• 7:30 pm: What is Fundamentalism?
  

Saturday, September 28

• 10:30 am: Fundamentalism in Religion and the Moral Life

• 12:15 pm: Fundamentalism in Politics

• 3:15 pm: Thinking “Fundamentally” About Identity and Race

• 5 pm: “Fundamentalist” Perspectives in the Arts

Sunday, September 29

• 10:15 am: “Fundamentalist” Perspectives in Education

• Noon: Closing Q&A

About the Speakers

Kwame Anthony Appiah is currently Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he teaches both in New York and Abu Dhabi. Among his literary and philosophical works are In My Father’s House, Avenging Angel, The Ethics of Identity, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, and most recently, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.

Roger Berkowitz is founding Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College where he is Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights. He is author of The Gift of Science: Leibnitz and the Modern Legal Tradition as well as editor of numerous works by and about Hannah Arendt—most recently, The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition.

Terence Diggory is Professor Emeritus of English at Skidmore College and author of numerous works of literary scholarship and criticism including William Carlos Williams and the Ethics of Painting, Yeats and American Poetry: The Tradition of the Self, and Grace Hartigan: An Exhibition Catalogue.

Carolyn Forche is University Professor at Georgetown University and the author of five books of poetry, including Gathering the Tribes (Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize), The Country Between Us (Lannan Poetry Selection of Academy of American poets and winner of Poetry Society of America Castagnola Award), The Angel of History (LA Times Book Prize), Blue Hour, and In The Lateness of The World. Her 2019 prose memoir, What You Have Heard is True, won the Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America. She edited the anthology Against Forgetting: 20th Century Poetry of Witness.

Rochelle Gurstein is the author of The Repeal of Reticence: A History of America’s Cultural & Legal Struggles Over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation & Modern Art and of a forthcoming book called Written In Water: The Classic & Its Afterlife, published this year by Yale University Press. A frequent contributor to Salmagundi, Raritan, and other periodicals, she was formerly a regular on-line columnist for The New Republic.

Laura Kipnis is Professor of Media Studies at Northwestern University and the author of many books, including Against Love: A Polemic, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, How To Become A Scandal, and Love in the Time of Contagion.

Tom Lewis is Emeritus Professor of English at Skidmore College and author of Empire Of The Air, Divided Highways, The Hudson, and other books. He was a writer for Ken and Rick Burns documentaries on The Civil War, The Brooklyn Bridge, and The Shakers, among others.

Susie Linfield is a Professor of Journalism at New York University. Formerly she was Director of the Cultural Reporting & Criticism Program there. Earlier she was a Deputy Editor of The Village Voice and Arts Editor of The Washington Post. Her books include The Cruel Radiance: Photography & Political Violence (winner of The Berlin Prize) and The Lions’ Den: Zionism & The Left From Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky.

Jesse McCarthy is Professor of English, African-American and African History at Harvard. He is the author of The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War, the essay collection Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? and the novel The Fugitives.

Claire Messud is the author of many novels, including The Woman Upstairs, The Emperor’s Children, When the World Was Steady, The Last Life, The Burning Girl, and This Strange Eventful History, among others. Her book of essays is Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write. She teaches at Harvard.

Jim Miller is Professor of Politics & Liberal Studies at The Graduate Faculty of The New School for Social Research. He is the author of many books, including The Passion of Michel Foucault, Democracy is in the Streets, Flowers in the Dustbin, Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy, History & Human Existence, and Can Democracy Work?

Orlando Patterson is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard and winner of The National Book Award for Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. His many other books include Slavery & Social Death, Rituals of Blood, The Ordeal of Integration, The Confounding Island: Jamaica & The Postcolonial Predicament, and others.

Darryl Pinckney is the author of the novels Old Cotton and Black Deutschland and of several non-fiction books, including Busted in New York, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature, Sold & Gone, and Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West 67th Street, Manhattan. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.

Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka, Zambia and is a Professor of English at Harvard University. She is the author of The Furrows (finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction), The Old Drift, Stranger Faces, and Seven Modes of Uncertainty. Among her many awards is the Caine Prize for African American Writing.

James Wood is a book critic and staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard. He is the author of many books, including The Broken Estate, The Irresponsible Self, How Fiction Works, The Fun Stuff, Serious Noticing, The Nearest Thing to Life, and the novels Upstate and The Book Against God.

Robert Boyers is the founding editor of Salmagundi Magazine, Director of The New York State Summer Writers Institute and Professor of English at Skidmore College. Among his many books are The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, The Academy & The Hunt for Political Heresies, The Fate of Ideas, The Dictator’s Dictation, Atrocity & Amnesia, After the Avant-Garde, Maestros & Monsters, and others.