Brandon Gauthier
Historian | Educator | Author
Introducing Brandon Gauthier, who will speak at the next TEDxAmoskeagMillyard event on October 10, 2024, at the Palace Theatre in Manchester, NH.
What's your favorite TED or TEDx Talk, and why?
“My escape from North Korea” by Hyeonseo Lee–a talk that highlights the humanity of the North Korean people. I had met Hyeonseo Lee at a conference not long before watching her story as a TED talk, which led me to then read her book and reach out to her.
What people or events have inspired you professionally?
I remain deeply moved by a philosophy Professor–Yoram Lubling–I had at Elon University. His ideas deeply impacted my future academic career, my book BEFORE EVIL, and my upcoming TED Talk: “And how is it,” Dr. Yoram Lubling asked me during an ethical philosophy course in 2002, ‘that in the wake of the Enlightenment, after centuries of debates about metaphysics and the human ‘soul,’ Nazi Germany murdered 6 million Jewish men, women and children?’ It was not a rhetorical question. It was a moral charge. Grapple with man’s inhumanity to man. That moment reverberates in my mind — a brilliant professor in a classroom in Powell, 20 years ago, demanding to know why homo sapiens, after 200,000 years of history, still behave with such brutality toward one another….The onus is on us, Dr. Lubling.”
I am also indebted to the work of Simon Sebag Montefiore, a historian who writes and speaks with energy and wit, demanding that academic conversations not be unduly burdened by dry discourse. History must reflect the emotions of what it means to be a person. (See Montefiore’s interview on Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar, for instance.)
If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?
To ease the unspeakable misery of human loss…of grappling with the painful reality that someone we love no longer exists on this planet.
How did you feel when you learned you had been chosen as a speaker for TEDxAM24?
Energized.
What do you most want TEDxAM24 attendees to know about you?
I'm moved to engage in discussions that are deeply relevant to our shared fate as people who are born, live, and die. (“This dying life–shall I call it?–or this living death,” as St. Augustine once said.) I feel awe when I reflect on the fate of our species as an animal in an expanse of time that transcends our intellectual faculties, all on a small planet in an endless interstellar cosmos.
