Starts: Mar 16, 2010 18:00

Ends: Mar 16, 2010 20:00

Color is an inescapable part of our experience of the world, but arguably there is no comparably salient aspect of daily life so poorly understood. Its descriptive partner, shape, is simpler: it can be mathematically modeled, and it is confirmable by senses other than sight. There is no coherent, agreed-upon explanation of color, and it cannot be confirmed by any other sense. The prevailing theoretical understanding is more or less that the experience of color is triggered by objective properties in the objects we see, but color does not quite belong to them, needing photoreceptors in the eye and activity in the brain to realize the experience. Color thus inhabits some indistinct border between the objective and the subjective, the phenomenal and the psychological. The problem shows up linguistically. We can intelligibly say that something is red but looks purple. What does it mean that being red and looking red might be different? What is the relationship between the sophisticated (if disciplinarily disaggregated) scientific understanding of color and our everyday experience of it? Drawing on research in the various domains of inquiry that are interested in color (inter alia, chemistry, biology, physics, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, art history), this lecture examines what we do when we speak of color, and what that speaking can tell us both about color and ourselves.

David Scott Kastan is currently the George M. Bodman Professor of English at Yale University, a position he assumed last year, having previously taught at Columbia University as the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities. Before Columbia, he taught at Dartmouth College. He has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Copenhagen and at the American University in Cairo. He has given lecture series at University College London, Oxford University, and Princeton. He is among the most widely read of contemporary scholars: among his books are Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time, Shakespeare after Theory, and Shakespeare and the Book. He has produced important scholarly editions of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part One, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Marlowe's Dr. Faustus; and he edited the recent five volume Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. He is also responsible for a number of influential critical anthologies, including Staging the Renaissance (with Peter Stallybrass), The New History of Early English Drama (with John Cox), and A Companion to Shakespeare. He currently serves as one of the general editors of the Arden Shakespeare, co-editor of the Bantam Shakespeare, and as the series editor of the new Barnes and Noble Shakespeare. He won Columbia University's Presidential Teaching Award in 2000 and was the winner of Columbia's inaugural Faculty Mentoring Award in 2004. He is presently finishing two books: Shakespeare and Religion and Living Color (coauthored with the distinguished English painter, Stephen Farthing).