St. John's College (Santa Fe) Lectures

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Krishnan Venkatesh on October 9, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “’To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogin.’ Any reader of Thoreau will have been struck by the quotations and allusions to Chinese and Indian thinkers on almost every page of his major wo...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Donna Orwin on October 2, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “This talk will compare the three Sevastopol sketches. Ms. Orwin will discuss the narrative structure of all of them with an eye to whether or not the point of view of the narrator changes. Who is this narrator in eac...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Grant Franks onSeptember 18, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided thisdescription of the event: “Our country is now celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Everyone understands the urge to place special emphasis on anniversaries that are even multiples of ten, but July 4, 1...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Jillian Conrad onSeptember 11, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “When is a threshold just an in-between space, andwhen is it the whole point?  A threshold is at once a place, a metaphor, a structure given to use by language.  It marks the space between one thing and another....

Audio recording of a lecture given by Tahirih Motazedian onSeptember 4, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “Key is one of the simplest building blocks of musicand a central property of a work’s musical identity—we refer to “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in C Minor,” not “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in Four Movements a...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Dean Sarah Davis on August 28, 2026 as part of the the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “At St. John’s we talk a lot about the importance ofquestions.  We understand that questioning is required for independence of mind, for one to come to one’s own conclusions, to live according to one’s own c...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Nick Gooding onJuly 29, 2026 as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.  The Graduate Institute Office has providedthis description of the event: “In Book V, Chapter 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle offers an account of ‘equity’ (epieikeia). The virtue of equity, according to Aristotle, serves as a necessary ‘correction of justice a...

Audio recording of a lecture given by David Satran on July22, 2026 as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.  The Graduate Institute Office has provided thisdescription of the event: “Between the events of the Prague Spring of 1968 and the fall of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia in the final months of 1989, a preeminent figure emerged within the dissident movement: Václav Hav...

Audio recording of a panel discussion given by tutor Seth Appelbaum and visiting scholars David Satran and Ahmed Siddiqi on July 15, 2026 as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “A panel of tutors and visiting scholars discuss the origins and goals of the Santa Fe Graduate Institute’s newest Master’s Degree Program, whi...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Musa al-Gharbi on July 8, 2026 as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “One virtue of a Great Books curriculum is that it helps pull people out of the immediate moment, allowing us deeper and richer context of contemporary society. In his lecture, Musa al-Gharbi will explore how Max...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor David Levine on July 1, 2026 as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Richard McCombson June 24, 2026 as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.  The Graduate Institute Office has providedthis description of the event: “After rejecting Christianity and God, George Eliot continued to speak, seemingly with approval, of conversion, saints, worship , and religion .  Onemight be tempted to write off her extensive...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Michael Grenkeon May 15, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided thisdescription of the event: “In his novella, Benito Cereno , Herman Melville depicts the aftermath of a slave uprising aboard a Spanish ship.  The ship is encountered by an American vessel, and the unknowing and friendly American captain vi...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Sarah Stickneyon May 8, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “This lecture will look at Prince Hal’s passage fromtavern brawler to battlefield hero in Shakespeare’s Henry VI part I.  Many elements of the play suggest that Hal will fail and Harry Hotspur will triumph; why d...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Jim Carey onApril 24, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “According to Aristotle, there is a science (epistēmē) that considers being as being, or that which is insofar as it is.  This science later came to be known as ‘metaphysics,’ a word that Aristotle himself does not...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor emeritus Howard Fisher on April 15, 2026 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "A puzzling phenomenon observed by Edison in one of his early light bulbs seemed to disclose a kind of electric current that did not fit the received ideas, for it was not confined to a co...

Audio recording of a tutor panel given by tutors AlisonChapman, Krishnan Venkatesh, and David Carl on April 3, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “What is aportrait?  The English word comes from the Latin word protrahere, ‘to draw forth,’ ‘to drag forward,’ ‘to bring tolight,’ ‘to produce for inspection,’ while th...

Audio recording of a lecture given by John Peters on March6, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “As far as we know the most complex thing the universe has brought forth, besides itself, is the human mind.  Among many other things, minds know things.  But what should we make of the fundamental fact that knowledge i...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Ken Wolfe on February 6, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “In the Origin of Species , Darwin points to analogies between biological and linguistic evolution and classification.  How strong are those analogies?  Why do they exist?  What do they tell us about human evolu...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor emeritus Howard Fisher on February 18, 2026 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Overland telegraph technology implicitly embodied a familiar image of electricity as being a mobile substance confined to conductors. But phenomena encountered in undersea telegraph ca...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Claudia Hauer on January 30, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “Emmanuel Levinas is a moral philosopher of the highest order. A student of Martin Heidegger’s, Levinas absorbed the tools of the phenomenological method, yet was repulsed by his teacher’s (at best) moral neu...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Andrew Nicholson on January 23, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali (c. 4th century CE) have been an inspiration for philosophers and yoga practitioners for over 1500 years. For just as long, the meaning of certain terms in Patañjali’s celebrated te...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Erik Baker on December12, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “People who are concerned about technological change,or who resist the adoption of new technologies, are often depicted as motivated by either an irrational fear of novelty or a purely material concern for their live...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Antoine Pageau-St-Hilaire on December 5, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “In both the Republic and the Laws, the leader of the philosophical conversation claims that the goodness of the πóλις and its citizens depend on the goodness or fineness of its civic play (παιδιά) (cf....

Audio recording of a lecture given by Erik Dempsey on November 14, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “This talk offers a close reading of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, focusing on the discussion of the economy of salvation in chapters 5-8. It looks especially at the relationship between the Mosaic Law and the...