UNE Center for Global Humanities presents ‘Is Harvard Killing Me?’ on March 25

In the early 2000s, Svetlana Boym emerged as one of academia’s leading public intellectuals. In just a few years’ time, the Russian-Jewish scholar produced a veritable library of influential books and papers, while receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy in Berlin Fellowship, and the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award. No one doubted that the prolific member of Harvard University’s Comparative Literatures department was on her way to ever greater heights.

But then tragedy struck when Boym received a cancer diagnosis. Six months later, the disease claimed her life in 2015. She was just 56.

Before she left this world, however, Boym reflected on all she had left behind when she immigrated to America in search of the physical and academic freedoms denied her in Russia. In her final, unpublished manuscripts, she reflected on what she had abandoned and betrayed to achieve her success. “Is Harvard killing me?” she asked herself shortly after her first session of chemotherapy. Grappling with the ultimate meaning of her life in its final days, she came to celebrate the Russian-Jewish culture, and its unlikely freedoms, she had known as a youth.   

This is the topic historian Tony David will take up when he visits the University of New England Center for Global Humanities to present a lecture titled “Is Harvard Killing Me?” on Monday, March 25, at 6 p.m. at the WCHP Lecture Hall in Parker Pavilion on the UNE Portland Campus for the Health Sciences.

David is a faculty member at UNE’s Tangier Campus and the author of nine books, including most recently “Friendly Fire: How Israel Became Its Own Worst Enemy and Its Hope for the Future,” which he wrote with Ami Ayalon, the former director of the Israeli Shin Bet. His next book, and the basis for this talk, is “The Daring Club: The Many Lives of Svetlana Boym” (Steerforth, 2024).

After telling the story of Boym’s physical and intellectual journey, David will conclude with a tribute to Boym that illuminates how her renewed passion for writing and the life of the mind can help us rethink the mission of the humanities.

This will be the fourth of five events this spring at the Center for Global Humanities, where lectures are always free, open to the public, and streamed live online. For more information and to watch the event, please visit: https://www.une.edu/events/2024/harvard-killing-me