Imaginative Seeing in Goethe, Coleridge, and Emerson: Pathways to a Phenomenological Ecology — Ryan Shea
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In “The Poet,” Emerson said that imagination is “a very high sort of seeing.” This talk explores the imagination as an organ of direct intuitive perception that might become the foundation for a new phenomenological science of ecology. The first part explores the historical and cultural resonances among conceptions of the imagination in German Idealism, British Romanticism, and American Transcendentalism, as represented by Goethe, Coleridge, and Emerson. The second part engages the audience in interactive imaginative exercises that invite participants to see new things for themselves.
Ryan Shea is a full-time researcher and educator at The Nature Institute in Ghent, New York. Previously, he taught environmental philosophy, philosophy of science, interdisciplinary humanities, and nature writing at Providence College for eight years. He is also a doctoral researcher with MESH (Multidisciplinary Environmental…
Programming Series: Transcendentalism. Contact: Laurie D. Sedgwick, CSWR Events Coordinator
ldsedgwick@hds.harvard.edu.
Friday, October 2, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Common Room, CSWR, 42 Francis Ave. Cambridge, MA.
Living Transcendentalism: Phenomenological Ecology and Nature's Wholeness Talk and Workshop
Living Transcendentalism: Phenomenological Ecology and Nature’s Wholeness
Friday, October 2, 3:30–5:00 pm Opening Talk & Discussion: Imaginative Seeing in Goethe, Coleridge, and Emerson: Pathways to a Phenomenological Ecology
Saturday, October 3, 9:00 am–5:00 pm Workshop: Living Transcendentalism: Phenomenological Ecology and Participating in Nature’s Wholeness
Registration is required.
Please register to attend in person.
The Friday opening talk and discussion is open to all.
Registration for the Saturday workshop includes attendance at both the Friday opening talk and the Saturday workshop. Workshop participation is limited to 15 attendees.
Inspired by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, this two-day workshop invites participants to cultivate a deeper relationship with nature's wholeness. Friday afternoon’s talk introduces the imagination as an organ of participatory knowing. Saturday’s all-day workshop is devoted to attending carefully to plants in their immediate appearances…
Programming Series: Transcendentalism. Contact: Laurie D. Sedgwick, CSWR Events Coordinator
ldsedgwick@hds.harvard.edu.
Saturday, October 3, 2026, 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM.
Common Room, CSWR, 42 Francis Ave. Cambridge, MA.
For more info visit cswr.hds.harvard.edu. Public Research Talk: Choosing Good or Evil—Royce and Emerson on Knowing the Difference with Scott Pratt
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In Studies of Good and Evil, Josiah Royce argues that moral agents must know both good and evil: One can act morally only by choosing good despite temptation. Yet Royce’s own framework complicates this distinction. Although he establishes the necessity of good and evil, he also concludes that no particular goods or evils are necessary, leaving moral agents without a certain means of identifying either when making a choice. This talk considers whether Ralph Waldo Emerson—despite interpretations that portray him as denying the existence of evil—offers another way to discern good and evil through the cultivation of what John Dewey later called aesthetic experience.
Scott L. Pratt is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. His research and teaching focus on American philosophy, including pragmatism, feminist philosophy, philosophies of race, and Indigenous philosophy, as well as philosophy of…
Programming Series: Transcendentalism. Contact: Bhaswar F. Khan, CSWR Assistant Director
bkhan@hds.harvard.edu.
Monday, October 5, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM.
Common Room, Center for the Study of World Religions
42 Francis Ave. Cambridge, MA.
For more info visit cswr.hds.harvard.edu. Public Research Talk: Frederick Douglass and Jesus Christ
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Abolitionists described themselves as followers of Jesus, but they disagreed about what kind of person he was. Douglass’s ideas about Jesus took shape in dialogue with the Transcendentalists: his Jesus was fully human, but he spoke to his contemporaries with a special “authority.” Douglass followed Jesus by “assum[ing] to speak of Slavery with some authority,” and he derived that authority from his lived experience of enslavement.
Ryan Carr is a lecturer at Columbia, where he teaches classes in American studies, English, and the Core Curriculum. He is the author of Samson Occom: Radical Hospitality in the Native Northeast (Columbia, 2023) and co-editor of the forthcoming Writings of Samson Occom (Oxford World's Classics, 2027). He is currently exploring the political thought of Frederick Douglass and his relationships with Transcendentalists and Christian liberals such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore…
Programming Series: Transcendentalism. Contact: cswr@hds.harvard.edu.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM.
Common Room, Center for the Study of World Religions
42 Francis Ave. Cambridge, MA.
In this Twilight: Tar Paintings in Conversation with American Transcendentalism by Christopher Volpe
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Please join us for the opening reception of Christopher Volpe's exhibition, In this Twilight: Tar Paintings in Conversation with American Transcendentalism.
Titled with a line from Whitman's Leaves of Grass, In this Twilight opens a space between longing for spiritual union with Nature and awareness of ecological decline. This body of work draws on the literature of American Transcendentalism to reflect on today's intertwined social and ecological crises not only as scientific or political challenges but also as the result of longstanding spiritual crises.
Each painting's title references the writings of Whitman, Emerson, Fuller, or Thoreau, while the imagery draws on the common flora and fauna of New England.
The primary medium is industrial coal tar, a byproduct of fossil fuel production. These paintings are made from one of the defining toxic byproducts of industrial civilization—the very material through which modern society has transformed…
Programming Series: Transcendentalism. Contact: cswr@hds.harvard.edu.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM.
Common Room, CSWR, 42 Francis Ave. Cambridge, MA.
For more info visit cswr.hds.harvard.edu. Public Research Talk: The Reformist Language of Plants: Marianne Dwight’s Botanical Watercolors with Alice de Galzain
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Shortly after moving to the Transcendentalist utopian community of Brook Farm in April 1844, Marianne Dwight Orvis joined the “Fancy Group,” a collective of women who hand-painted goods for sale in Boston. She described the project as seeking the “elevation of woman to independence, and an acknowledged equality with man” (Letters from Brook Farm, 32). This talk examines how Dwight, by binding flowers into “books,” used the language of flowers to narrate her experience with Fourierism. It situates her botanical watercolors within the broader context of antebellum women’s engagement with reform and shows how her floral books symbolically articulated both the harmony with nature sought by Transcendentalists and the feminist possibilities of socialist communalism and labor reform.
Alice de Galzain is a postdoctoral researcher and former Marie Skłodowska-Curie Seal of Excellence Fellow at Sorbonne Université…
Programming Series: Transcendentalism. Contact: Bhaswar F. Khan, Assistant Director, CSWR.
Monday, October 19, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM.
Common Room, CSWR, 42 Francis Ave.
Cambridge, MA.
For more info visit cswr.hds.harvard.edu. Stanley Cavell's Transcendental Etudes Conference
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Organized to commemorate the centenary of philosopher Stanley Cavell's (1926–2018) birth, Stanley Cavell's Transcendental Etudes brings together leading scholars to explore the enduring significance of his thought for contemporary conversations in religion, ethics, and politics. While Cavell is widely recognized for his contributions to ordinary language philosophy, aesthetics, literary criticism, and political theory, the religious dimensions of his work have received comparatively less attention.
Presented as part of the Center for the Study of World Religions' Transcendentalism Initiative, the conference explores the dimensions of Cavell's thought that emerge through his sustained engagement with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the broader Transcendentalist tradition.
The conference will feature four keynote addresses and a concluding panel discussion examining the continued relevance of…
Programming Series: Transcendentalism. Contact: cswr@hds.harvard.edu.
Thursday, October 22, 2026, 9:00 AM – 4:00 PM.
Common Room, Center for the Study of World Religions
42 Francis Ave. Cambridge, MA.
Public Research Talk: Passionate Micrology: Thoreau and Nietzsche’s Erotics of the Closest Things with Nicholas Low
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Philosophers are often caricatured as having their heads in the clouds, their mind’s eye focused inwardly on far-off visions of “the good,” “the beautiful,” and “the true.” But Friedrich Nietzsche and Henry David Thoreau, the two greatest philosophical descendants of Ralph Waldo Emerson, invert this familiar image, both practicing, in their own ways, a form of philosophy passionately focused on what Nietzsche called the “closest things,” those peculiar, sometimes squalid, and typically ignored matters that make up humanity’s moment-to-moment experience of embodied living. Borrowing Theodore Adorno’s concept of micrological analysis, this presentation examines how Thoreau and Nietzsche, separately but together, strove to reorient the practice of philosophy toward the shadowy micrological frontier. Each calls their inheritors to a disciplined but deeply passionate thinking of the particular and the sensuous, but…
Programming Series: Transcendentalism. Contact: cswr@hds.harvard.edu.
Monday, October 26, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM.
Common Room, Center for the Study of World Religions
42 Francis Ave. Cambridge, MA.
Public Research Talk: “For Children Who Care to Learn”: Caroline Dall, Self-Culture, and Patty Gray’s Journey to the Cotton Islands
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In the preface to the first volume, Patty Gray’s Journey to the Cotton Islands, Caroline Dall explains to her young readers that she writes this book because children should be told the truth. Imagining the plaintive complaint of a young reader who asks, “But what good will it do?” she answers, “My dear little sister, if you will read all about it, and understand it, you will help others to remember all that God has been teaching us in this terrible war, and what we are already beginning to forget” (vi-vii).
This talk will explore the ways that Dall, in her children’s book series Patty Gray’s Journey, translated slavery, the Civil War, and the aftermath of both for young readers. Her insistence that children must know difficult truths reflects her belief that resilience is forged through knowledge, a belief rooted directly in her Unitarian and Transcendentalist principles, particularly self-culture.
LYDIA…
Programming Series: Transcendentalism. Contact: cswr@hds.harvard.edu.
Monday, November 2, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM.
Common Room, CSWR
42 Francis Ave. Cambridge, MA.
Public Research Talk: Transcending the Ordinary: Thoreau's Second Experiment
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This talk will introduce Thorson's just-published book, The Walden Experiments: The Science of Henry David Thoreau. It will open with two examples of Thoreau's science in Walden, his "agent" for accessing "Universal Intelligence." In the first case, he will show a striking visual image of something yellow on black, which seized Thoreau’s visual perception as does abstract art. On closer inspection, he recognizes this to be "the sulphur-like pollen of pitch the pine" floating on the surface of Walden Pond that will eventually sink downward through his "great ocean of solitude" to reach the bottom, the sedimentary archive of deep-time where the airborne sexual grains of life will merge with cosmic dust in the place where "Walden sleeps with stars in its bosom." In this example, Thoreau’s art prompted his science, which became transcendental literature. Following a second example involving blue lake ice, Thorson…
Programming Series: Transcendentalism. Contact: cswr@hds.harvard.edu.
Monday, November 9, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM.
Common Room, CSWR
42 Francis Ave. Cambridge, MA.
For more info visit cswr.hds.harvard.edu. Public Research Talk: Transcendentalism, Memorialization, and Harvard's Slavery History
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A house in Concord, Massachusetts, associated with one of the four founding benefactors of Harvard Medical School is currently threatened by a state transportation project. The house also occupies an unexpected place in the history of American Transcendentalism: Henry David Thoreau was the first to investigate its owner’s enslavement of Brister Freeman, one of the “former inhabitants” of Walden Woods who preceded Thoreau there. In addition to providing the stolen labor that helped establish an institutional leader in countless global health initiatives, Freeman also protested immoral poll taxes decades before Thoreau made tax resistance central to American political thought.
This lecture argues that Harvard's ongoing reconstruction of its slavery "entanglements" (the university’s term) continues a distinctly Transcendentalist project of recovering obscured histories like Freeman’s by allowing conscience,…
Programming Series: Transcendentalism. Contact: cswr@hds.harvard.edu.
Monday, November 16, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM.
Common Room, CSWR
42 Francis Ave. Cambridge, MA.
Hindu View of Life Lecture: Special Dispensations, Sublime Realities: Keshab Chandra Sen and the Comparative Impulse in the Nineteenth Century
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Radhakrishnan’s lectures on Hindu views of life 100 years ago emphasize how the world then, after a devastating world war, was witnessing an interchange of thought between religions through the mingling of populations. Furthermore, the spirit of the age and the need of the hour determined the emphasis in each religion.
This lecture will explore how interchange of thought between religions flourished in certain circles in nineteenth-century India, through an examination of the thought and major works of Keshab Chandra Sen (1838-1884), a Bengali philosopher of religion and social reformer who pioneered a range of comparative religious projects. Through an examination of his compilations of excerpts from a diversity of religious texts as well as his relationship to religions outside of Hinduism, Sen serves as a major precursor to Radhakrishnan’s contributions to modern and contemporary views on religion in the…
Programming Series: Annual Lectures. Contact: cswr@hds.harvard.edu.
Monday, November 16, 2026, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM.
Common Room, CSWR
42 Francis Ave. Cambridge, MA.