Connecting Art and Ethics

Above, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at USC (left), converses with Alexander Nemerov, in Martínez Celaya’s studio in Culver City, California.

Nemerov, Art and Art History Department Chair and Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University, was the latest scholar to speak as part of The Lecture Project, a series of talks Martínez Celaya created in 2010 and now hosts and curates in association with USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. The Lecture Project invites prominent writers, historians and philosophers to discuss the connection between art and ethics.

In his Feb. 6 lecture, “Summoning Pearl Harbor,” Nemerov focuses on the Japanese military’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and explores how words make the past reappear, how historians summon long-ago events and for whom the past is recalled.