Partisan Science and Other Fundamentalisms

About the Speaker

gary saul morson

Gary Saul Morson is the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of Arts and Humanities and a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. As author or editor of twenty books, he has considered the nature of time, the role of quotations in culture, the novel and utopia as literary genres, the history of European and Russian thought, and his favorite writers — Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. He has won “best book of the year” awards from the American Comparative Literature Association and the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Together with Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro, he wrote Cents and Sensibility:  What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities and, most recently, Minds Wide Shut:  How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us.  He has recently completed a comprehensive study of the Russian literary and intellectual tradition entitled Wonder Confronts Certainty:  How Russian Writers Address the Ultimate Questions and Why Their Answers Matter.