Speaker: Tara Isabella Burton

Novelist, theologian, and culture critic. She has written the novels Social Creature, The World Cannot Give, and Here in Avalon, and the nonfiction books Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World and Self-Made: Curating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians.
She received her DPhil in theology from Oxford in 2017.

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Science-popularizing lecture from the new series Science at the Prague Castle.

In an era where more and more of us, enabled by social media and the Internet's attention economy, are encouraged (or pressured) to "brand ourselves," what does it mean to be truly human? Dr. Burton will argue that the idea that we not only can, but create ourselves, is not just a contemporary idea, but one that is inextricable from the development of the idea of secular modernity from the Renaissance onwards -- one that reaches its nadir in our current Internet age.

The lecture will be given in English.

Organized by Prague Castle Administration, Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry 
of the CAS, and Charles University. Supported by IOCB Tech Foundation.

Recording of the lecture is available here.