Romance Languages Special Guest Colloquium: Antonia Arslan and Siobhan Nash-Marshall

Special Guest Colloquium: Antonia Arslan and Siobhan Nash-Marshall

“Post-Truths and People: The Armenian Genocide and its Negation”

        We hear much talk, today, about post-truth. Journalists and intellectuals often describe it as a shocking new phenomenon caused by recent electoral campaigns. They point to contemporary political statements as horrendous post-truths. But ‘Historical engineering’ is not a new phenomenon. Nor are the events to which journalists point as exemplary instances of ‘post-truth’ particularly poignant. ‘Historical engineering’ is the intellectual twin of ‘social engineering’ and has been taking place on increasingly large scales since the dawn of the modern world.

Sponsored by the Romance Languages Fund

Antonia Arslan was a professor of Italian modern and contemporary literature at the University of Padova  She is the author of innovative studies in nineteenth century Italian literature (Dame, droga e galline. Il romanzo popolare italiano fra Ottocento e Novecento) and on the “submerged galaxy” of Italian women writers (Dame, galline e regine. La scrittura femminile italiana fra '800 e '900, and, with G. Romani, Writing to Delight. Italian Short Stories by Nineteenth-Century Women Writers). Through the poetry of the great Daniel Varujan (who died during the Genocide) – which she translated with C. Megighian and A. Hemmat Siraky – she gave voice to  her profound and unexpressed Armenian identity. 

Siobhan Nash-Marshall is a Professor of Philosophy and the Mary T. Clark Chair of Christian Philosophy at Manhattanville College. Her specializations are metaphysics and medieval philosophy. Author of many academic books and articles –  “Free Will, Evil, and Saint Augustine” in Quaestiones Disputatae; “Evil, Pain, and the Problem of Properties” in Aquinas and Maritain on Evil: Mystery and Metaphysics; “Lies, Damned Lies, and Genocide” in Metaphilosophy and “Boethius’s Influence on Theology and Metaphysics to the XVI century” in Brill Companion to Boethius in the Middle Ages – she has also written books for the general public like Joan of Arc: A Spiritual Biography and What it Takes to be Free: Religion and the Roots of Democracy.