David C. Miller, professor of English at Allegheny College, will deliver the next Karl W. Weiss ’87 Faculty Lecture, “Chicago Consciousness: Democratic Reform and Sensorimotor Awareness,” at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 15 in the Henderson Campus Center, Room 301/302.
Miller’s talk will focus on consciousness and sensorimotor awareness in urban reform, contrasting the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, better known as the “White City,” with Hull-House, founded in an immigrant ghetto. While the Fair presented an ideal city alongside the all-to-real city of Chicago, offering a spectacle of global forces such as consumerism and imperialism, Hull-House fostered mutual exchange across ethnic, class and cultural lines. The two approaches were grounded in opposing notions of human perception and interaction still with us today. Miller will examine the ideas of architect Louis Sullivan, reformer Jane Addams, philosopher John Dewey and sociologist George Herbert Mead.
The Karl Weiss Faculty Lecture Series hosts seven to eight lectures per year by faculty members from various departments in an effort to represent the diversity of scholarship at Allegheny.