Lecture: Danish critic and literary historian Georg Brandes is today remembered principally for his role in launching the "Modern Breakthrough" in Scandinavian Literature, as founder of the discipline of comparative literature, and as the initial gateway through which Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were introduced to Europe. Less celebrated is an equally significant aspect of his long life in letters, his tireless activity on behalf national minorities, stateless peoples and the colonized, a corpus of some thirty-five essays and speeches produced between 1900 and 1925. The lecture investigates Brandes' engagement with the long suffering Armenian people.

Speaker: Dr. William Banks received his PhD in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin on 2013. From 2014 through 2017 he was Lecturer in the Department of German, Scandinavian and Dutch at the University of Minnesota. He is currently completing a critical edition in English of Georg Brandes’ collected writings on international human rights issues.