Public Research Talk: Transcendental Imagination: The Case for a New American Renaissance with Kristen Case

Common Room, Center for the Study of World Religions
42 Francis Ave. Cambridge, MA
Mon., Sep. 14, 2026, 12 – 1:30 p.m.



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This talk explores the transcendentalist reimagining of sociality and temporality, aspects of human experience that underwent broad transformations in the late nineteenth century. In our own time, as we navigate unprecedented access to the globe and to one another while also experiencing ever-increasing loneliness and disconnection, the relationship between self and world is once more a site of contestation and cultural renegotiation.
At the same time, our hyperconnectivity means that our experience of time is ever more fragmented, accelerated, and homogenized. As human creativity and connection are threatened by AI and algorithmic determinism, the example of the transcendentalist writers can help us recommit to an imaginative reorganization of our experience.

Kristen Case is a poet and scholar whose books include American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice, Little Arias, Principles of Economics, Henry David Thoreau's Kalendar, and Daphne. She has co-edited several essay collections on American writers and is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau with James Finley. 
Case serves as Executive Director of the Monson Seminar, a residential arts and humanities program for Pell-eligible college students, and is visiting faculty at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. She lives in Maine. 

Programming Series: Transcendentalism
Gazette Classification: Humanities, Lecture, Religion
Sponsor: Center for the Study of World Religions
Contact: Laurie D. Sedgwick, CSWR Events Coordinator, [email protected]
More info: cswr.hds.harvard.edu…