This lecture was presented virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A moral philosopher and public intellectual, Susan Neiman’s international eminence is attested by her large scholarly contributions and public engagement on issues of race, racism, and the memory of the Holocaust in Germany. Her recent book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (2019) has received much attention in the United States for its reflections on how our society remembers its legacy of slavery and racism in comparison to the way that Germany has sought to address its Nazi past. Neiman interrogates how we can change conflict, misunderstanding, and ignorance about the injustices of our past into a moral vision for organizing our shared path into the future. Her 2015 book, Evil in Modern Thought, provides the conceptual underpinnings for her study into memory and memorials.