We went to two lectures at the Chicago Humanities Festival, the first by Patty Nelson Limerick, my most influential college professor and senior advisor, and the second by Roger Myerson, from our own U of C Department of Economics. It was really, really great to see Patty. Roger made a nice case for restraint in international diplomacy, using game theory.
Patricia Nelson Limerick: The Baskes Lecture in History
A much-admired and compelling historian of the American West who teaches at the University of Colorado, Limerick explores the legacy of our nation’s westward expansion, aggression, and conquest. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995 for her work.
This annual lecture recognizes a generous contribution to the Chicago Humanities Festival by Julie and Roger Baskes.
Charles Storch of the Tribune reported on her talk:
In honor of Billy the Kid, races are held in New Mexico in which participants lug tombstones. In Pleasant Valley, Ariz., parades are held to commemorate the bloody Graham-Tewksbury feud. "How is it," asked Nelson Limerick, "that some very brutal episodes of projectiles entering the bodies of humans get to be so fun?" The University of Colorado professor and author observed our tendency to romanticize the depraved and homicidal. As a scholar and as a recent widow, Limerick said she had no truck with trivializing death. Yet she enlivened her account of one deadly range war with witty asides. Her conclusion is that "a human population shaken by the prospect of death does what it can to get away from it, and popularizing feuds is one way." Roger Myerson: Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict Cooperative and non-cooperative game theory, primarily devised for its economic applications, can provide unique perspective into the behaviors of nations and the politics of war. Myerson is a professor in the Department of Economics, University of Chicago, anddirector of graduate studies. His book, Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict, is the standard textbook on the topic.
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