Massey Lectures to kick off at Concordia
Lawrence Hill. | Photo by Nigel Dickson
Canada’s best-known public lecture series is coming to Concordia for the first time.
Blood: The Stuff of Life is the tantalizing title of the 2013 Massey Lectures series, to be delivered this fall by Canadian author Lawrence Hill. On October 15, the university will host Hill’s inaugural lecture at the D.B. Clarke Theatre in the Henry F. Hall Building.
Hill will then travel on to Halifax, Edmonton, Vancouver and Toronto. All five lectures will be broadcast by the CBC radio program Ideas, and published by House of Anansi Press.
Best known as the author of The Book of Negroes — which won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Award — Hill is currently adapting his bestselling novel into a six-part television miniseries.
The former journalist published a memoir, Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White, in 2001; the print edition of Blood: The Stuff of Life will be his ninth book. He also gave a standing-room-only talk at Concordia for the 2010 Congress of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
In the 2013 Massey Lectures, Hill says he’ll examine how blood is “a bold and enduring determinant of identity, race, deprivation, athletic superiority and nationhood.” He’ll also consider how “it is so vital to our sense of ourselves, our abilities, and our possibilities for survival that we have invested money, time and energy in learning how to manipulate its very composition.”
For 53 years, the Massey series has allowed a noted thinker to explore the results of original research in his or her field via five public lectures and hour-long CBC radio broadcasts.
The series is named after Vincent Massey, the man who headed the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences before being appointed Canada’s first Governor General. Past speakers include Martin Luther King, Jr., Claude Lévi-Strauss, Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ignatieff and Jane Jacobs.
Tickets are now on sale for the 2013 Massey Lecture series, online at Admission.com and by phone at 1-855-790-1245.
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