What’s Up Down South with Richard H. King

Richard H. King is Emeritus Professor in American and Canadian Studies at University of Nottingham, UK. His special area of interest is intellectual history of the US, Europe, and the Black Atlantic. His particular interests focus on political thought and critiques of race and racism, along with the exploration of the cross-cultural and transnational movement of ideas and systems of thought. He is presently working on a project, The American Arendt, that will assess Hannah Arendt’s influence on American thought and culture–and the latter’s influence on her thought.

Free and open to the general public.

ABSTRACT:

In his presentation, Richard King will discuss the the German Jewish refugee political thinker, Hannah Arendt, and the relevance of her work to the South. Arendt’s work was heavily influenced by southern writers and historians. Her favorite American novelist was William Faulkner, and she was clearly influenced by the work of Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty. She was also a fan of poet Randall Jarrell, who taught at UNCG (then Women’s College) at the time of his death. Arendt firmly believed that those who held the roles of writers and historians could help people come to terms with their collective past (e.g. Germany after WWII and the American South), and through her work, she made a distinct mark on thought and culture in the twentieth-century South.