Stanley Cavell's Transcendental Etudes Conference
Registration is required.
In-person registrations are full.
Please register to attend on Zoom.
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
Registration is required.
Please register to attend in person.
Please register to attend on Zoom.
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
Registration is required.
Please register to attend in person.
Please register to attend on Zoom.
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
Registration is required.
Please register to attend in person.
Please register to attend on Zoom.
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. Through the Transparent Darkness: Transcendentalism, Art, and Imagination in the Anthropocene
Registration is required.
Please register to attend in person.
Transcendentalism identified nature and imagination as organs of spiritual union, yet we are actively devastating nature on a global industrial scale while failing to imagine livable alternatives. This talk explores flashpoints between Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau and modern philosophical, spiritual, and ecological thinkers such as Henry Corbin, Albert Camus, Donna Harroway, Owen Barfield, and Simone Weil, to envision an ethical and aesthetically inflected path toward a renewed bond with the planet. Can Transcendentalism be applied to advance a reanimated humanities that can address the foundational split between spirit and matter and help us unplug, slow down, pause, and be present enough to face what we know to be true?
Christopher Volpe is a New Hampshire–based artist, writer, and educator whose paintings explore mortality, mysticism, and the environmental consequences of contemporary consumer culture. His work is held in numerous institutional…
Programming Series: Transcendentalism. Contact: cswr@hds.harvard.edu.
Monday, November 9, 2026, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM.
Emerson Chapel, Divinity Hall
Harvard Divinity School.
Public Research Talk: Transcendentalism, Memorialization, and Harvard's Slavery History
Registration is required.
Please register to attend in person.
Please register to attend on Zoom.
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
Registration required.
Please register to attend in person.
Please register to attend on Zoom.
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.
Public Research Talk: Plato, the American Genius: The Life of Emerson's Orient
Registration is required.
Please register to attend in person.
Please register to attend on Zoom.
For nearly a century, scholars have traced the influence of Asian thought on American Transcendentalism. Building on this scholarship, this talk examines Emerson’s construction of the Orient and the role it played in the larger metaphysical geography of his thought. Emerson’s encounter with Asian traditions was mediated by a Platonic understanding of East and West, a dialectic he believed was approaching a new historical threshold in America. Plato furnished the philosophical framework through which Emerson brought Confucius, Hindu scripture, Persian poetry, and European mysticism into a shared intellectual horizon. Within this framework, Emerson imagined the emergence of a distinctly American genius, liberated from the inherited geographical and philosophical divisions of Eurasia. Finally, the talk follows Emerson’s reception in China, where his philosophy of individuality enters into contemporary debates over…
Programming Series: Transcendentalism. Contact: cswr@hds.harvard.edu.
Monday, November 30, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM.
Common Room, CSWR
42 Francis Ave. Cambridge, MA.
Public Research Talk: How Divinity Scholars Found the Human in the Humanities
Registration is required.
Please register to attend in person.
Please register to attend on Zoom.
In “We Philologists” (1875), Nietzsche charges his profession with asking the wrong question. Research should be guided not by “what are we to science?” but by “what is science to us?” Emerson, his lifelong educator, had explored this question decades earlier. In “Literary Ethics” (1838), he credits German scholars with recognizing that “Greek history is one thing to me; another to you”—an insight that drew Transcendentalists and other figures associated with Harvard and the Unitarian church toward German research. This lecture traces how professionalized methods of inquiry and public literary criticism shaped each other across the Atlantic. It shows how reading, translation, conversation, and pedagogy connected scholarship to religious and social life, generating public forms of poetic critique with urgent stakes in liberal education, religion, and women’s intellectual authority.
Ulrike Wagner is Director of…
Programming Series: Transcendentalism. Contact: cswr@hds.harvard.edu.
Monday, December 7, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM.
Common Room, CSWR
42 Francis Ave. Cambridge, MA.