What happens when intellectuals get involved with political movements? This is one of the questions that Harvey Teres, associate professor of English in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences, will attempt to answer in his lecture, "American Intellectuals and Activism Since the Thirties," to SU Library Associates at 4 p.m. March 22 in the Hillyer Room, on the sixth floor of Bird Library.
Teres will address how scholars, writers and artists can contribute to social change, how they can reach out to the poor, and how the poor might be manipulated and corrupted in the process. He will illustrate his lecture with slides featuring rarely seen artifacts from the 1930s and 1950s that are housed in the library's Department of Special Collections.
To supplement the lecture, an exhibition titled "The Bloody Crossroad Where the Arts and Politics Meet" will be on display in Bird Library beginning March 21. The exhibit will include magazines, early paperbacks, cartoons, photographs and drawings.
Teres received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1986 and taught at Princeton University until 1993, when he joined the SU faculty. He has written a book titled "Renewed the Left: Politics, Imagination and the New York Intellectuals" (Oxford University Press, 1996), as well as articles for the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, the Partisan Review and Modern Philology, among others. He spent the 1998-99 academic year in China as a Fulbright Senior Scholar.
