Upcoming Events
Fall 2024
HRC Repair Conversation: Democratic Fragility, Democratic Repair
Join us for an interdisciplinary conversation on the past, present, and future careers of democracy in the U.S. and beyond.
Date: Thursday, November 7, 2024
Time: 12:00 – 1:00 PM
Location: Kraft Hall 130
Registration: https://events.rice.edu/event/hrc-democratic-repair
Lunch will be served
Spring 2025
HRC Repair Conversation: Higher Ed under Repair—Fissures and Futures
Featuring:
- Patricia Okker, Higher Education Consultant; former President of the New College of Florida
- Holden Thorp, Editor-in-Chief, Science Journals; former University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) Chancellor
Date: Wednesday, March 26, 2025
Time: 4 PM
Location: TBA
Registration: https://events.rice.edu/event/hrc-higher-ed-under-repair
Reception to follow
About Patricia Okker:
American literature professor. Marathon runner. University president. Powerlifter and weightlifter. Dean. Patricia Okker has worn many hats through her life and career and witnessed the changing and challenging landscape of higher education.
Born and raised in New Jersey, Okker is a first-generation college graduate who went to college expecting to be a science major. But she discovered her true passion for American literature and has since devoted much of her career to the humanities and its critical role in developing leaders.
She rose through the ranks at the University of Missouri to become dean of MU’s College of Arts and Science, where she led efforts that improved student retention rates, increased the college’s diversity of faculty and leadership, implemented a college-wide initiative around career education, and successfully completed the college’s largest fundraising
campaign.
In 2021, she became the first woman president of New College of Florida, boosting enrollment and endowments while building stronger community and industry partnerships. She was fired in a hostile political takeover of the school in early
2023, prompting community outrage and Okker’s alignment with groups like PEN America to protect open expression and academic freedom.
Okker holds a bachelor of arts from Allegheny College and master of arts from the University of Georgia. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She recently was honored with the Modern Language Association’s Francis Andrew March Award for her contribution to the profession.
About Holden Thorp:
Holden Thorp became Editor-in-Chief of the Science family of journals on 28 October 2019. He came to Science from Washington University, where he was provost from 2013 to 2019 and professor from 2013 to 2023. He is currently a professor at George Washington University and on leave to serve as the Editor-in-Chief at Science.
Thorp joined Washington University after spending three decades at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), where he served as the 10th chancellor from 2008 through 2013.
Thorp earned a bachelor of science degree from UNC, a doctorate in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology, and completed postdoctoral work at Yale University. He holds honorary degrees from Hofstra University and North Carolina Wesleyan College and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Thorp cofounded Viamet Pharmaceuticals, which developed VIVJOA (oteseconazole), now approved by the FDA and marketed by Mycovia Pharmaceuticals. Thorp is a venture partner at Hatteras Venture Partners, a consultant to Ancora and Urban Impact Advisors, and is on the board of directors of PBS, the College Advising Corps, and Saint Louis University. He serves on the scientific advisory boards of the Yale School of Medicine and the Underwriters’ Laboratories Research Institutes. In 2023, STAT named Thorp to its STATUS list of top leaders in the life sciences.
Thorp is the coauthor, with Buck Goldstein, of two books on higher education: Engines of Innovation: The Entrepreneurial University in the Twenty-First Century and Our Higher Calling: Rebuilding the Partnership Between America and its Colleges and Universities, both from UNC Press.
Past Events
Fall 2024
The Humanities Research Center welcomes the Rice and Houston communities to join us for a keynote lecture on the HRC’s 2023-25 theme of Repair, featuring the award-winning nonfiction writer, poet, and scholar Maggie Nelson.
Date: Friday, September 20, 2024
Time: 4 PM
Location: Herring Hall 100
Reception to follow
MAGGIE NELSON is the author of several acclaimed books of poetry and prose, including Like Love: Essays and Conversations (2024), the national bestseller On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021), the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and international bestseller The Argonauts (2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011), Bluets (2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007), Something Bright, Then Holes (2007), and Jane: A Murder (2005; finalist, the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir). She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA grant, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation, and a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. Since 2017 she has been a professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Spring 2024
In Spring 2024, the HRC hosted its inaugural thematic event: Repair Conversation #1.
This interdisciplinary conversation featured three Rice scholars representing distinct humanistic and artistic vantage points:
- Alexander X. Byrd (Vice Provost for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Rice University; Associate Professor, Department of History; Co-Chair, Task Force on Slavery, Segregation and Racial Injustice, Rice University)
- Lacy M. Johnson (Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of English)
- Samuel Reis-Dennis (Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Philosophy and Medical Humanities Program)
- Moderated by Graham Bader (Director, Humanities Research Center; Professor, Department of Art History)
To think about repair means to consider not just present conditions, but past circumstances of things and systems that we recognize as broken, or perhaps as having never functioned at all. Repair also encompasses future aspirations—the prospect of remediation, refurbishing, restoration. Devices and objects, of course, are often in need of repair, as are bodies, psyches, systems, environments, institutions, ideologies, cultures, histories… the list goes on.
The Humanities Research Center invites you to join our series of conversations around the theme of repair. The goal is to build multi-layered conversations about how various scholars and practitioners in the humanities and the arts mobilize the idea of repair, both through its embracing and contesting.
Our two-year-long program features dialogic panels, workshops, and public lectures.