Cornel West, professor of religion and African-American studies at Princeton University, and author of the best-selling book Race Matters (1993), will visit the Marian Miner Cook Auditorium on Thursday, Sept. 16. His lecture begins at 6:45 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
Praised by The New York Times for his "ferocious moral vision" and hailed by Newsweek as "an elegant prophet with attitude," his passionate oratory and deep grasp of a multitude of subject matter (from hiphop culture to a treatment on Nihilism and Nietzsche) has rendered him one of the most sought after lecturers in the country.
West's Race Matters, which has sold 400,000 copies, is credited with changing the course of America's dialogue on race, justice, and democracy. Through the 1990s and into this decade, he has continued to produce a steady stream of authored and co-authored books for academics and for a more general audience, including Breaking Bread (with bell hooks, 1991); Jews and Blacks (with Michael Lerner, 1995); The Future of the Race (with Henry Louis Gates Jr., 1996); and The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Century (with Henry Louis Gates Jr., 2000). His newest, Democracy Matters, aims to "look unflinchingly at the waning of democratic energies and practices in our present age of American empire."
West holds degrees from Harvard and Princeton, and has also taught at Union Theological Seminary, Yale Divinity School, and Harvard University. He is the recipient of the American Book Award, and has received more than 20 honorary degrees.