This event is open to members of The University Seminars community only. Registration is required.
This year’s Tannenbaum Lecturer is Margo Jefferson and the Tannenbaum-Warner Award recipient is Robert Pollack.
TANNENBAUM LECTURE
Criticism as Intellectual Inquiry and Emotional Invention
Being an Other in America teaches you to imagine what can’t imagine you. I was thinking, when I first wrote this, of certain kinds of otherness. Otherness in terms of race, gender, and class; in terms of temperament and aesthetics. I was thinking about the charged relations between fact, practice, ideology, and passion when one writes criticism. And of the social structures that allow one to discuss any of this and be listened to. This is all part of what’s called Critical Authority. Critical authority traditionally favors omniscience. What happens when we treat critical authority as a process that encourages vulnerability, ambiguity, and ambivalence? A process that allows us to examine our own responses – anger, despair, exhilaration, ecstatic confusion? What happens when we’re willing to question ourselves as scrupulously as we do our subjects: to keep re-inventing our critic-personae?
Margo Jefferson is a critic and memoirist. She has published three books: On Michael Jackson, Negroland, and Constructing a Nervous System. She received a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism when she was a staff writer at The New York Times. She has also received a National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, a Windham Campbell Award for nonfiction and a Rathbones Folio Award for nonfiction. Her reviews and essays have been published in The Guardian, New York Magazine, The Washington Post and other periodicals. She teaches at Columbia University in the Writing Program.
TANNENBAUM-WARNER AWARD
For Distinguished Scholarship and Exceptional Service to The University Seminars
Robert Elliot Pollack (b.1940) grew up in the Seagate neighborhood of Brooklyn where he attended public schools. The first in his family to finish high school (his father ran a factory that manufactured cardboard boxes), Bob went on to major in physics at Columbia University, graduating from the College in 1961 and serving as Dean of Columbia College from 1982 to 1989. In his freshman year, he took a class with Robert Belknap, whom he succeeded as Director of The University Seminars (from 2011 to 2019). He earned a PhD in biological sciences from Brandeis University in 1966 and was a postdoctoral fellow in pathology with Howard Green at NYU Medical Center and at the Weizmann Institute in Israel with Ernest Winocour. He was then recruited to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory by James Watson to establish a research program on reversion of cancer cells. He received tenure at SUNY Stony Brook Medical Center before returning to Columbia in 1978. He received the Alexander Hamilton Medal from Columbia University, the Gershom Mendes Seixas Award from the Columbia/Barnard Hillel, and held a Guggenheim Fellowship. His 1998 Schoff Lectures, supported by The University Seminars and Columbia University Press, led to his third book The Faith of Biology and the Biology of Faith. Bob retired from Columbia in 2023 as Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences. He credits his wife since 1961, the artist Amy Pollack, for teaching him the central importance of not being solely in charge.
