Ruby lecture: Bridging the digital divide
September 14, 2000
[NORTON, Mass.] [~] The new elite of the Information Age and the problems posed by the growing technological gap between the digital have[base ']s and have-not[base ']s will be the subject tackled by renowned scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah, who will deliver the first lecture in this year[base ']s Jane E. Ruby Humanities Lecture Series at Wheaton College.
Appiah will discuss the necessity of Bridging the Digital Divideon Thursday, Sept. 28 at 7:30 p.m. in the Holman Room in Mary Lyon Hall. Admission is free and open to all.
Appiah is a prolific and world-renowned scholar and author who serves as professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy at Harvard. Among the many awards he has won are the prestigious Woodrow Wilson Fellow and Andrew W. Mellon Fellow awards.
With Amy Gutmann, Professor Appiah authored ''Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race'' (Princeton University Press, 1996), winner of the Annual Book Award of the North American Society for Social Philosophy and recipient of the Ralph J. Bunche Award of the American Political Science Association for the best scholarly work in political science which explores the phenomenon of ethnic and cultural pluralism. He has written five other books, including ''In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture'' (Oxford University Press, 1992), winner of the Annisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association for the best work published in English on Africa, and ''Of Necessary Questions'' (Prentice-Hall, 1989), an introduction to analytic philosophy. He is co-editor with Henry Louis Gate, Jr. of ''The Dictionary of Global Culture'' (Knopf, 1996) and he and Professor Gates are now co-editing the ''Perseus Africana Encyclopedia.''
In addition, Professor Appiah has published many articles and reviews on topics ranging from post-modernism to the collapse of the African state. His philosophical work has largely been in the philosophy of language and of mind; his work in African and African-American Studies focuses on questions of race, ethnicity, culture, and identity.
Professor Appiah earned his B.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Cambridge University
in England. His first teaching post was at the University of Ghana, and he has since taught at Cambridge University, Yale, Cornell, and Duke.