This Friday (11/15) at 3:30 pm in Ruane 105, the Humanities Forum will host Christine Rosen, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, monthly columnist for Commentary magazine, one of the cohosts of The Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast, a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, and senior editor at The New Atlantis. Her lecture will be about the effects of technology on human behavior and experience. For more information about this forum lecture and others, visit our website!
Technology has colonized nearly every public and private space, and most of us spend more time staring at screens than at our fellow human beings. How has this changed us? What crucial human experiences have we undermined in our pursuit of lives of greater convenience and efficiency? What important human skills — such as face-to-face communication, working with our hands, practicing patience, and understanding our own and each other’s behavior — have deteriorated as we outsource more of our decision-making to technology? What does it mean to defend the human and what human values should we be cultivating to counteract the powerful pull of our technologies?
Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on American history, society and culture, and technology and human behavior. She is also a monthly columnist for Commentary magazine, one of the cohosts of The Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast, a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, and senior editor at The New Atlantis. She was previously a distinguished visiting scholar at the Library of Congress. Rosen is the author or coauthor of many books and book chapters. Her books include The Extinction of Experience (W. W. Norton, 2024); My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood (PublicAffairs, 2005), which was named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by the Washington Post; and Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (Oxford University Press, 2004). Her opinion pieces, articles, and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, National Affairs, National Review, the New Atlantis, the New Republic, the New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Politico, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New England Journal of Medicine, among other outlets. Rosen has a PhD in history, with a major in American intellectual history, from Emory University, and a BA in history from the University of South Florida. She also holds a third-degree black belt in aikido and is a martial arts instructor. She lives with her family in Washington, D.C.
