The History of Happiness

Friday, October 18, 2024

7:00 PM - 9:30 PM

In this practice-based seminar, Darrin McMahon will share his long standing research on the history of human happiness.  McMahon will frame the session by identifying a number of crucial historical shifts in the way human beings have conceived "happiness" since antiquity. Following a close group reading of a primary text, we will perform a joint Practice of Attention to activate key questions raised by McMahon's research. Participants can expect to leave with a deeper historical sense of "happiness" and human flourishing (and, we dare to hope, with additional first-hand experience of happiness itself!).

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Darrin M. McMahon is the David W. Little Class of 1944 Professor of History at Dartmouth. Educated at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale, where he received his PhD in 1998, McMahon is the author, among other books, of Happiness: A History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), which has been translated into twelve languages, and was awarded Best Books of the Year honors for 2006 by the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Library Journal, and Slate Magazine.