Is Harvard Killing Me?

Anthony David will join us VIRTUALLY from UNE'S campus in Tangier, Morocco.

In this lecture, historian Anthony David will discuss how we can overcome the crisis of the humanities by reflecting on the life of Svetlana Boym, the Russian-Jewish scholar who died of cancer in 2015.

Drawing on his forthcoming biography of Boym titled The Daring Club, David will introduce listeners to Boym’s life in Leningrad in the 1970s, where her teachers at the Daring Club, an after-school writing program housed in an old Czarist palace, taught her to write, think, and act freely despite Soviet tyranny. David will follow Boym through her emigration to America in 1981 and into her academic stardom at Harvard. He will explain how it was only after she was diagnosed with cancer that Boym reflected on what she had abandoned and betrayed to achieve her success. “Is Harvard killing me?” she asked herself shortly after her first session of chemotherapy. Grappling with the ultimate meaning of her life during her six-month illness, she came to celebrate the Russian-Jewish culture, and its unlikely freedoms, she had known as a youth.

After telling the story of Boym’s physical and intellectual journey, the lecture will conclude with a tribute to Boym that illuminates how her renewed passion for writing and the life of the mind can help us rethink the mission of the humanities.

Biography

Anthony David is an historian, teacher, and author of nine books, most recently Friendly Fire: How Israel Became Its Own Worst Enemy and Its Hope for the Future, which he wrote with Ami Ayalon, the former director of the Israeli Shin Bet (Steerforth, 2021). His next book is The Daring Club: The Many Lives of Svetlana Boym (Steerforth, 2024).

Assigned Reading

Anthony David, “Uncultured Life Lived to the Brim.” Massachusetts Review. Volume 64, Number 2, Summer 2023.