2026 Carl Weber Memorial Speaker: Harvey Young, Vice President for the Arts, Dean of the College of Fine Arts, and Professor of English, Theatre, and African American & Black Diaspora Studies at Boston University

Please Note

Roble Gym is affected by the current campus heating outage, and the theater will be cooler than normal. Warm attire is suggested.

ADMISSION

Lecture

FREE
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Department
Seminar

FREE
Open to Stanford students, faculty, and staff

WHEN & WHERE

Lecture

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 19
6:00 – 7:30PM
HARRY J. ELAM, JR. THEATER IN ROBLE GYM

Department
Seminar

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 20
NOON – 1:30PM
ROBLE GYM 137

SPONSORS

The annual Carl Weber Memorial Lecture and Seminar are made possible through a generous gift by TAPS Professor Carl Weber (1925-2016).

About Harvey Young

Harvey Young is the inaugural Vice President for the Arts, Dean of the College of Fine Arts, and Professor of English, Theatre, and African American & Black Diaspora Studies at Boston University. A historian and cultural critic, he is the author/editor of eleven books including Embodying Black Experience, Theatre & Race, and most recently Theater and Human Flourishing. He has appeared on CNN and Good Morning America and within the pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe among other major news outlets.

Public Lecture

How Anti-racism Lost the Popular Vote: Race, Performance and the Idea of America

Great Depression-era photo, Walker EvansFrom the protests catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis to present-day ICE deployment in the same city, the shifts in momentum of rivaling campaigns for “justice” have been staged publicly for all to witness. In this talk, Harvey Young looks back on the rise of #BLM and the popular embrace of antiracist ideas in society—with an emphasis on college campuses and arts institutions—and accounts for their subsequent loss of momentum and enforced retirement in the face of resurgent nationalism.

Department Seminar

Spectacles of Violence as Performance

Tailored for the PhD students at Stanford but open to the Stanford community, this Department Seminar/Workshop explores the challenges and ethics of engaging (as a researcher, scholar, and artists) with historical events that were intended to be  terrorizing and/or traumatizing. It will also explore how theatre artists, such as playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks and Nia Akilah Robinson, have centered similar abuses in their works. The seminar asks, what is our responsibility to discover, hold, and share histories of violence? 

Recommended (but not required) Pre-reading

Must be logged in via an @stanford.edu account to view

    1. Harvey Young, “Whipping the Black Body in Delaware” Theatre Journal (March 2023)
    2. Instagram Video. “The Great Privation” Living Local DMV  (October 7, 2025)