Human values have eroded as technology alters the way people live, according to an accomplished scholar from the University of Miami. John Paul Russo visits campus April 14 to discuss that premise in an evening lecture titled “The Future Without a Past: The Humanities in a Technological Age.”
The talk, named after Russo’s most recent book, will be held in Whitley Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. Elon members of Phi Beta Kappa are sponsoring the event.
The Future Without a Past: The Humanities in a Technological Age, won the Thomas N. Bonner Award for 2006. Russo goes beyond currently given reasons for the decline of the humanities – philosophy, literature, fine arts – and searches out its root causes in the technological advances of everyday life.
One premise is that the relation between humans and nature has altered to such a degree that people no longer live in a natural environment but in a technological one.
What are the implications of this shift for the humanities, traditionally seen as safeguards of the human? Russo believes that if humans understand how technology “works” and the nature of its powers, people will then know in which realms it must be accepted and where it should be resisted.
Russo teaches at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla., and is former director of graduate studies. He is also the author of I. A. Richards: His Life and Work and co-editor of the journal Italian Americana.
For more information, contact Elon professors Russell Gill at gillruss@elon.edu or Prudence Layne at playne@elon.edu.