"Las Vegas and the Post-Industrial World" and "I Brake for Feminists: A Short History of Feminism and its Discontents" will be two entries in UNLV's University Forum lecture series in November.
On Nov. 20, UNLV history professor Hal Rothman will discuss how Las Vegas, almost by accident, has become a center of the post-industrial world.
The old practices of Nevada the colony -- that ability to allow people from core areas such as California to come to Las Vegas to cast off their sins -- appears to be a virtue in the post-industrial world, Rothman maintains. He says Las Vegas has a peculiar cachet and is a model to which cities, states, and regions look to create their own economic panaceas.
In his presentation, Rothman will offer a view of Las Vegas that answers questions about its past, present, and future, while assessing how well Southern Nevada's peculiar brand of economic miracle translates across the nation.
"I Brake for Feminists: A Short History of Feminism and Its Discontents" will be the topic when Ruth Perry speaks on Nov. 25.
Perry, a professor of humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, asks why "the press has always had a snide word to say about feminists." According to Perry, in the past few years the media have taken particular delight in publishing attacks on women's studies programs and attacks on feminist scholarship made by women who claim to be feminists, such as Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia.
In her talk, Perry intends to show that "those who claim that women's studies is political rather than scholarly, focused on male-bashing and promoting feelings of victimization, cannot have read any of the scholarship of the last 20 years, or -- if they have -- cannot have understood it."
All University Forum lectures are free and open to the public. Both the Nov. 20 and Nov. 25 lectures are scheduled for 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium of UNLV's Marjorie Barrick Museum of Natural History.
The University Forum lecture series is sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and underwritten by the UNLV Foundation. For additional information on the series, call 895-3401.
