This series offers public scholarship in an Emergency, presenting thinkers and writers from the NYU intellectual community whose work has an urgent bearing on the present. These experts will present historical and contemporary case studies that can help us to comprehend our political moment and think together, beyond the sense of alarm and anxiety that emergencies provoke. Reflecting on Fascist Europe, authoritarian Argentina, medieval Arab Spain, the Mediterranean, the Global South, the Caribbean, and the United States, the talks will offer historical contexts for the civil and humanitarian emergencies of the present, and provoke conversations that foster our capacity for informed engagement and response.

With deep contexts, these lessons in cultural history help us ask: What do we need to know in an emergency? How is this emergency related to the past and how is it particular to the present? What do we need to learn and remember in moments of social fracture? How do we reason urgently? How can we learn differently? What emerges in an emergency?

**Prof. Jo Labanyi inaugurates The Emergency Lectures on March 9th with **“The Political Uses of Emotion: What Can We Learn from Spanish Fascism?”