The Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College is pleased to invite you to a conversation with Lauren Lassabe Shepherd and Nayanika Ghosh. They will discuss and contextualize how notions of expertise and neutrality have been as much eroded from within the university and academic disciplines as those norms have been from without. Andy Hines, Senior Associate Director of the Aydelotte Foundation, will moderate the discussion.
This event will be held on October 27, 2025 at 4:15pm in the IC Dome at Swarthmore. It is open to all in the Tri-Co community and to the public. The program will also be livestreamed. Those who wish to join virtually must register here. A recording of this conversation is featured on the Aydelotte Foundation podcast, Podalot.
The event is part of the Aydelotte Foundation’s project on “Race, Racism, and the Liberal Arts.” This project assembles work on underrepresented histories of how people, institutions, and ideas have existed outside of, pushed against, or reshaped from within the ideas and institutions of the liberal arts. It also investigates and recounts curricular, epistemological, and institutional genealogies that challenge how or whether the term liberal arts has silenced histories and ways of knowing developed by Black people, indigenous people, and people of color.
More information about the featured speakers can be found below.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd is a historian of US colleges and universities. Shepherd is the author of Resistance from the Right (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) and host of the American Campus Podcast. Her forthcoming book projects are Degrees of Liberation with John R. Legg and Inventing the Liberal University.
Nayanika Ghosh is a postdoctoral associate in the Dept. of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at Duke University. She recently completed her PhD in the history of science from Harvard University. Her research brings interdisciplinary scholarship on science, race, and gender in conversation with the histories of U.S. higher education, the New Left, and the Cold War. She is currently working on her first monograph, Genes and the Left: Sociobiology and the Backlash Against Radical Science.
