If you are in Reno on Monday, October 1 at 4 pm, I really urge you to stop by Schulich Lecture Hall on UNR’s campus for what promises to be a great talk by Aaron Santesso, a UNR English professor. The lecture is presented by the Core Humanities Program and is called
“Dickens in the Casino: Surveillance, Empiricism, and the Novel.” Here’s a description:
Casino surveillance and the Victorian novel seem like odd bedfellows — and yet one might say that every surveillance agent is a Dickens fan at heart. This lecture will look at modern casino surveillance as a system which attempts to make the individual instantly knowable, and will trace the history of parallel attempted systems in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, philosophy and science.
I’ve talked with Professor Santesso about his ideas, and I think the lecture is going to be brilliant. He’s asking and answering questions that aren’t immediately obvious, but make perfect sense. If you’re in Reno on Monday, you should see this.