College Hosts Fourth Annual Cardinal Newman Lecture
On Sept. 9, Manhattan College continues the Newman Lecture series with cultural historian and media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan, Ph.D.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, Ph.D., cultural historian and media scholar, will present There is No Such Thing as the Internet: Mythologizing and Misunderstanding the Digital Moment at the fourth annual Cardinal Newman Lecture at Manhattan College on Monday, Sept. 9 at 4:30 p.m. in Hayden Hall, room 100. The event is free and open to the public.
Vaidhyanathan is currently the Robertson Professor in Media Studies at the University of Virginia (UVA). In 2011, he was appointed chair of UVA’s Department of Media Studies and became a prominent voice of the faculty in the 2012 controversy surrounding the ousting of UVA president Teresa A. Sullivan.
As a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for the Future of the Book, he is also a frequent contributor on media and cultural issues in various periodicals including the Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation and Salon.com. In addition, Vaidhyanathan maintains a blog, www.googlizationofeverything.com.
Hailed as one of the top movers and shakers in the library field, Vaidhyanathan lauded librarians in the March 2002 edition of the Library Journal for being “on the front lines of copyright battles” and “the custodians of our information and cultural commons.” The Chronicle of Higher Education called Vaidhyanathan “one of academe’s best-known scholars of intellectual property and its role in contemporary culture” in 2004. He has also testified as an expert before the U.S. Copyright Office on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The Cardinal Newman Lecture was launched at Manhattan College in 2010 to celebrate Cardinal John Henry Newman’s beatification, which occurred on Sept. 19, 2010, in Birmingham, England, at a ceremony presided over by Pope Benedict XVI. The goal of the lecture series is to reaffirm the significance of the liberal arts as the core of undergraduate education. Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University stressed the central place of the liberal arts in the Catholic intellectual tradition, as well as education in the professions.