"Humanities and The Sciences," with Vinton G. Cerf, Michael Witmore, and Amy J. Elias
Channel: Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Date: 2019-10-02

Vinton G. Cerf, VP and Chief Internet Evangelist of Google, talks with Michael Witmore, Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, about the relation between the computing sciences and the humanities. Hosted by the University of Tennessee Humanities Center, Knoxville, TN, September 2019. For full video of the evening dialogue between Vinton Cerf and Michael Witmore, see http://uthumanitiesctr.utk.edu/media/video.php
              Vinton G. Cerf is Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet, and is the author of numerous publications. He has served in executive positions at ICANN, the Internet Society, MCI, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, and DARPA. He is the past president of the Association of Computing Machinery and served as a member of the National Science Board. Cerf has received numerous awards, including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, US National Medal of Technology, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the Prince of Asturias Award, the Tunisian National Medal of Science, the Japan Prize, the Charles Stark Draper award, the ACM Turing Award, the Legion d'Honneur, the Franklin Medal, and 29 honorary degrees. He is a Foreign Member of the British Royal Society and the Swedish Academy of Engineering.
             Michael Witmore, a scholar of Shakespeare and early modern literature as well as a pioneer in the digital analysis of Shakespeare’s texts, is Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Prior to that, he was a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin where he directed the Working Group for Digital Inquiry, a group of humanists who use computers to assist in traditional humanities research. His books include Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (2001), the co-winner of the 2003 Perkins Prize for the study of narrative literature; Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (2007); Shakespearean Metaphysics (2008); and Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare (2010) with photographer Rosamond Purcell. He was the co-curator with Purcell of the 2012 Folger exhibition "Very Like a Whale," based on Landscapes of the Passing Strange. He co-edited Childhood and Children's Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1800 (2006) and Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion (2015). Witmore earned an A.B. in English at Vassar College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.
             Amy J. Elias is Director of the UT Humanities Center and Lindsay Young Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction, winner of the 2002 Perkins Prize for the study of narrative literature and coeditor of Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (2016) and The Planetary Turn (2015). She is a principal founder of ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and founding co-editor of its award-winning scholarly journal.