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This is a past event that happened on Saturday, January 28th, 2017 at 2:30pm.
One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. The mind has invented Hell, it has invented predestination to Hell, it has imagined the Platonic ideas, the chimera, the sphinx, abnormal transfinite numbers (whose parts are no smaller than the whole), masks, mirrors, operas, the teratological Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the unresolvable Ghost, articulated into a single organism …. I have tried to rescue from oblivion a subaltern horror: the vast, contradictory Library, whose vertical wildernesses of books run the incessant risk of changing into others that affirm, deny, and confuse everything like a delirious god.
– Jorge Luis Borges, The Total Library (1939)
What is the significance of libraries, their loci (brick-and-mortar, internet, digital, and representational, i.e., in the minds, solitary and communal, of the writer and reader, in the books, the worlds depicted therein and the minds depicted within those worlds , etc.), and their epistemic, organizing, and mnemonic functions?
Participants:
Daniel Goroff
Daniel L. Goroff is Vice President and Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a grant-making philanthropy that supports breakthroughs in science, technology, and economics. He is also Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Economics at Claremont’s Harvey Mudd College, where he served as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty. Dr.... read more! »Anthony Grafton
Anthony Grafton studied history, classics and history of science at the University of Chicago and University College London. He teaches European history at Princeton University, where he has worked since 1975. He has been a visiting professor at the Collège de France, the Louvre, the University of Munich, the Warburg Haus in Hamburg and Columbia... read more! »Carol Mandel
Dean, NYU Division of Libraries
Carol A. Mandel is Dean of the NYU Division of Libraries, which includes NYU’s libraries in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai; along with Campus Media Services, University Archives, and the NYU Press. She has been a leading figure in research librarianship during its turn of the 20th-century transformation in a digital environment. Her work... read more! »Alberto Manguel
Writer and translator
Alberto Manguel is an Argentinian-Canadian writer, translator and critic. He has published both fiction and non-fiction, and received numerous international awards, among others the Formentor Prize 2017 and the Gutenberg Prize 2018. Until August 2018, he was the director of the Argentine National Library. He lives in New York.