Lauren Michele Jackson
Lauren Michele Jackson is Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University. Her research and teaching focus on American and African American literary and cultural production, with particular interests in race, aesthetics, and affect across literature and popular culture. Her first book, White Negroes (Beacon Press, 2019), was shortlisted for the Museum of African American History Stone Book Award. Her second book, Back: Essays on the Soul and Spine of America (Amistad/HarperCollins), explores the figure of the back across American art and culture. A contributing writer at The New Yorker since 2020, Jackson received the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing in 2025.
Benjamin Saltzman on the ethics of averting one’s gaze.
Why do we turn away from human suffering? What does it mean to lower our heads in grief or cover our faces in shame? In this conversation, Deputy Dean of the Arts and Humanities and Professor of English Benjamin Saltzman explores one of humanity's most familiar yet enigmatic gestures through the lens of his new book, Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture.
Drawing on literature, film, philosophy, art, and religion—from Plato and Augustine to Marc Chagall, Langston Hughes, and the present day—Saltzman traces how acts of looking away have shaped our moral and political imagination for centuries. The result is a timely meditation on attention, empathy, and the complicated ethics of witnessing.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Speaker(s): Benjamin Saltzman and Lauren Michele Jackson