Elaine Scarry, Quinn Slobodian and Brandon M. Terry on Boston Review at 50

Harvard Book Store and the Boston Review welcome Elaine Scarry—the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value at Harvard University—Quinn Slobodian—professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University—and Brandon M. Terry—the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and Codirector of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center—for a discussion celebrating the Boston Review and their 50th anniversary issue The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide. They will be joined in conversation by Aziz Rana—author and the J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government at Boston College.

Ticketing

There are two ticket options for this event. Copies of the Boston Review's 50th anniversary issue will be available for purchase at the event.

1. Book-Included Tickets: Includes admission for one and one pre-signed copy of The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide.
2. Admission-Only Tickets: Includes admission for one.

Note: Books bundled with tickets may only be picked up at the venue the night of the event, and cannot be picked up in-store beforehand. Ticket holders who purchased a book-included ticket and are unable to attend the event will be able to pick up their book at Harvard Book Store up to 30 days following the event. This offer expires after 30 days. Please note we cannot guarantee signed copies will be available to ticket holders who do not attend the event.

About The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide

The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide is Boston Review’s 50th anniversary issue. This milestone issue features many of our longtime contributors, including Robin D. G. Kelley, Vivian Gornick, and Elaine Scarry, and celebrates classics from our archive. In this issue, historian and Boston Review contributing editor Robin D. G. Kelley revisits Noam Chomsky’s landmark 1967 essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” published near the height of the Vietnam War. The essay’s dissident injunction—that those in privileged positions have a duty to “speak the truth and expose lies”—remains a powerful call to conscience, Kelley argues, but the anti-fascist and anti-colonial struggles of even earlier decades reveal its limits, and they show how to refuse and resist complicity in our own age of fascism and genocide. Political philosopher Martin O’Neill, Palestinian human rights lawyer Jennifer Zacharia, and historian David Waldstreicher expand on what this moment requires—of intellectuals, of journalists, and of us all.

Also in the issue, Vivian Gornick reviews Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces, Elaine Scarry challenges the wisdom that Plato banished the poets, Brandon M. Terry interviews political scientist Cathy Cohen about social movements and the future of Black politics, Joelle M. Abi-Rached exposes the contradictions of the liberal international order over Gaza, Samuel Hayim Brody reviews three memoirs on the Arab Jewish world destroyed by colonialism, David Austin Walsh explains what Zohran Mamdani’s triumph means for the future of the Democratic Party, and Sandeep Vaheesan looks to the New Deal to assess the “abundance” agenda.

Plus, seven writers reflect on notable essays from our archive in a special anniversary feature:

• Susan Faludi on Vivian Gornick and anti-feminism
• Naomi Klein on William Callison + Quinn Slobodian and the global right
• Jay Caspian Kang on Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and identity politics
• Ryu Spaeth on Merve Emre and the personal essay
• Lea Ypi on Joseph Carens and amnesty
• Nathan J. Robinson on Noam Chomsky and U.S. foreign policy
• Rick Perlstein on Elaine Scarry and democracy after 9/11

Bios

Elaine Scarry is Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her book The Body in Pain was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His books, which have been translated into ten languages, include, most recently, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right and Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy. A Guggenheim Fellow for 2025-6, he has been an associate fellow at Chatham House and held residential fellowships at Harvard University and Free University Berlin. Project Syndicate put him on a list of 30 Forward Thinkers and Prospect UK named him one of the World’s 25 Top Thinkers.

Brandon M. Terry is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and Codirector of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He is the coeditor, with Tommie Shelby, of To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and editor of Fifty Years Since MLK.

Aziz Rana is the J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government at Boston College. His research and teaching center on American constitutional law and political development. In particular, Rana’s work focuses on how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding of the country. His first book, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard University Press) situates the American experience within the global history of colonialism, examining the intertwined relationship in American constitutional practice between internal accounts of freedom and external projects of power and expansion. His latest book, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them (University of Chicago Press, 2024), explores the modern emergence of constitutional veneration in the twentieth century -- especially against the backdrop of growing American global authority -- and how veneration has influenced the boundaries of popular politics. Rana is an editorial board member of Dissent, The Law and Political Economy Blog, Just Security, and The Journal of American Constitutional History. He is also a Life Member of the Council of Foreign Relations and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. ​He received his A.B. from Harvard College summa cum laude and his J.D. from Yale Law School. He earned a Ph.D. in political science at Harvard University, where his dissertation was awarded the University's Charles Sumner Prize.

Masking Policy

Masks are encouraged but not required for this event.

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