LEXINGTON, Ky.—Todd Gitlin, well-known political writer, novelist, cultural commentator and professor at Columbia University, will speak at Transylvania Thursday, Feb. 12, at 7:30 p.m. in the William T. Young Campus Center. Gitlin’s lecture, “The Future of Enlightenment,” is sponsored by the Center for Liberal Education at Transylvania University and is free and open to the public.
Gitlin, one of the nation’s leading thinkers about the media, has degrees in three different subjects: mathematics (B.A., Harvard), political science (M.A., Michigan) and sociology (Ph.D., Berkeley). He has written widely on the mass media and cultural politics in America. In the 1960s, he was president of Students for a Democratic Society, organizing the first national demonstration against the Vietnam War and the first civil disobedience directed against American corporate support for the apartheid regime in South Africa.
A prolific writer, Gitlin is the author of 12 books including The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage; The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars; Letters to a Young Activist; and The Intellectuals and the Flag. He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals and general interest periodicals such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, The Nation and Harper’s Magazine. He is on the editorial board of Dissent, a contributing writer to Mother Jones, a member of the board of trustees of opendemocracy.net and is frequently on-line at tpmcafe.com and cjr.org. Gitlin is often on National Public Radio, PBS, ABC, CBS and CNN. He has held teaching posts at various institutions around the world, including Berkeley, NYU, University of Toronto, University of Oslo and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
For more information, contact the public relations office at (859) 233-8120 or political science professor Jeff Freyman at (859) 233-8273.