Join Prof. Jeremy Mulderig at a book launch celebrating The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward  published by the University of Chicago Press.

Wednesday, April 18 at 7 PM
Unabridged Bookstore
3251 N. Broadway

On August 21, 1978, a year before his seventieth birthday, Samuel Steward (1909–93) sat down at his typewriter in Berkeley, California, and began to compose a remarkable autobiography. No one but his closest friends knew the many different identities he had performed during his life: as Samuel Steward, he had been a popular university professor of English; as Phil Sparrow, an accomplished tattoo artist; as Ward Stames, John McAndrews, and Donald Bishop, a prolific essayist in the first European gay magazines; as Phil Andros, the author of a series of popular pornographic gay novels during the 1960s and 1970s. Steward had also moved in the circles of Gertrude Stein, Thornton Wilder, and Alfred Kinsey, among many other notable figures of the twentieth century. And, as a compulsive record keeper, he had maintained a meticulous card-file index throughout his life that documented his 4,500 sexual encounters with more than 800 men.

The story of this life would undoubtedly have been a sensation if it had reached publication. But after finishing a 110,000-word draft in 1979, Steward lost interest in the project and subsequently published only a slim volume of selections from his manuscript.

It’s arguably getting harder and harder to know what’s true.  Fake news is in the news, but what if fake nous—a problem with mind, rationality, and epistemology themselves—is the problem?  Surely, knowing what we don’t know becomes the first step toward a corrective.  Following the screening of Damien Hirst’s new documentary revealing heretofore undiscovered treasures from the deep, three scholars take the stage.  Lorraine Code (York University), the most important voice in contemporary feminist epistemology, investigates “manufactured uncertainty” and how male-oriented ways of knowing have obscured truth rather than uncovered it.  Angie Blumberg (DHC Visiting Fellow) looks at fake records in history, thus challenging our understanding of our past as well as our present.  And Andrew Shtulman (Occidental College), author of the best-selling book Scienceblind, explains why common sense often leads us to false scientific conclusions about the world.  Nothing is necessarily what it seems as the DHC investigates what it means to know truth and to know truly!

The workshop is open to anyone in the DePaul community who wants to learn how to do social network analysis of literary and historical data sources using Gephi, an open-source network analysis and visualization software package.

Friday, April 6 at 3:00pm to 4:30pm
Richardson Library Lincoln Park Campus, 103

RSVP