Davíd Carrasco

Professor, Writer, Lecturer, Activist

See Davíd Carrasco lead the way in inaugurating the “Eduardo Matos Moctezuma Lecture Series” in Mexico and Harvard. This is the first time in Harvard's almost 400 years that a lecture series in the name of a Mexican scholar has been launched.

The Announcement (1:32)

The Full Event (1:16:55)

HDS Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy Cornel West delivered the 2017 Convocation address “Spiritual Blackout, Imperial Meltdown, Prophetic Fightback,” on August 29, 2017.

Davíd Carrasco and Cornel West in “Whose Eyes on What Prize: A Black and Brown Discussion of Shades of Invisibility”, Doris Sommer Responds

Davíd Carrasco spoke at the American University Hall of Fame several years ago. Check out this stirring speech about how his father recruited and coached Dick Wells the first African American basketball player to play college ball in the nation's capital—at American University. Besides the historically black Howard University other schools like Maryland, George Washington, Georgetown and Catholic University did not recruit or support African Americans to play in college sport until after Coach Carrasco's American University teams.

Hear David Carrasco, University of Chicago Divinity School's Alumnus of the Year (2014) hold forth about the formation of his own thought as an Historian of Religion working in Mesoamerican cities and symbols. Carrasco tells the story of how he created his distinctive “ensemble” approach by running his own threads of thinking and emotion through the works of the Romanian Mircea Eliade, the African American Charles Long, Mexican poet Octavio Paz and British urban ecologist Paul Wheatley. Follow his storytelling about how his Mexican American identity prepared him to travel with Toni Morrison to Mexico City to meet with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Its worth a listen for as the actor Peter Fonda once said when he heard Carrasco speak at the Santa Fe Film Festival, “I wish I could speak like you. I can only act like I can speak like you!”

Carrasco spoke at the UTSA Mexico Center and the UTSA Center for Cultural Sustainability hosted conference “Bridging Cultures: Assessing the Cultural Heritage of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo Borderland”

Partners in Health founder and Harvard's Kolokotrones University Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine Paul Farmer discusses how he was influenced by liberation theology. Farmer spoke with Davíd Carrasco, the Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America, and HDS student Lauren Taylor on February 11, 2014. The event was sponsored by Harvard Divinity School's Science, Religion, and Culture Program.