Video Lectures

Matisse’s Scale: What’s with the Bamboo Stick? In this public lecture, Bois will focus on Matisse’s use of the bamboo stick in large-scale works and the bodily conception of scale it entails. In a photograph dating from 1931, Matisse is shown...

During most of history, inequality was the habitual and reasonable standard, while equality stood in need of justification, if it was considered at all. Inequality was omnipresent, palpable and realistic, while equality had to be imagined, argued...

Latin America’s move in recent decades to greater levels of democracy and economic development are undermined by weak institutions, corruption and the lure of populism. While it is a zone of peace with no international hostilities or significant...

Public Lecture: Ernst Kantorowicz: Institute Events and Some Unpublished Writings of a Towering Twentieth-Century Intellectual Drawing on his recently published, and quickly acclaimed, biography of Ernst Kantorowicz, Robert E. Lerner will recount...

S.T. Lee Lecture: Philologists as Rogues? Benjamin Elman, Gordon Wu ’58 Professor of Chinese Studies at Princeton University and former Mellon Visiting Professor (1999-2001) in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute, will deliver a public...

The American Revolution had an enormous, but bitterly divisive impact on European (and Canadian and Latin America) political thought and attitudes. From 1776 began a furious ideological war within the USA over the question of democracy that helped...

What brought about the current chaos in the Middle East? Did the machinations of the Cold War exhaust the region leaving it unable to develop new relationships between governor and governed? As Americans, how much should we criticize our role or...

Pablo Picasso did not speak often about abstraction, but when he did, it was either to dismiss it as complacent decoration or to declare its very notion an oxymoron. The root of this hostility is to be found in the impasse that the artist reached in...

In this public lecture, Michael Pettis will explore China’s tumultuous stock market and its impact on the global economy. A Wall Street veteran at Bear Stearns and Credit Suisse First Boston, Pettis has the unique distinction of having been right...