The Brooklyn Institute warmly invites you to our Fifth Annual Institute Social—taking place this year outdoors in the friendly confines of Prospect Park! Join us for an afternoon of light snacks, refreshments (we’ll supply, but BYOB!), lively conversation, and, if you dare, karaoke. All proceeds help support the Brooklyn Institute’s core operations, as well as our many public initiatives ...

“Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things,” William Morris wrote, “the leading passion of my life has been, and is, a hatred of modern civilization.” For Morris, the Pre-Raphaelite artist, designer, poet, and socialist whose writings and work helped establish the Arts and Crafts movement, each passion fed the other. How can we understand the intersection of Morris’ political, social, and artistic values and beliefs? What kind of socialism, and what kind of art, arises from a rejection of industrial civilization? ...

How does studying racial capitalism help us better understand race, capital, and the contemporary world? What implications does the concept of racial capitalism have to a discussion about identity, consciousness, and ideology? How do anti-capitalist and anti-racist theory and practice align (or fail to align)? What—or who—embodies the Black Radical Tradition in the 21st century?

The biblical story of the Flood permeates the popular imagination. What can a close reading of the story of the flood teach us: about justice and punishment, death and redemption, humanity and nature, and the ways we use myth, even today, as a means for contemplating profound, perhaps inscrutable, questions about human society and the human condition? ...

Written at the crest of the revolutionary wave sparked by the cataclysm of World War I and the 1917 Russian Revolution, Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness stands as one of the most influential Marxist texts of the 20th century. Though suffused with the revolutionary spirit of its time, History and Class Consciousness nevertheless attempts to take stock of the failure of revolutions in Germany (both in Berlin and in Bavaria) and in Lukács’ native Hungary. How was it that people could fail to recognize their own material interests and be convinced to act against them? ...