Kwame Anthony Appiah will deliver the first lecture of the 2011 Syracuse Symposium at 7:30 p.m. in the Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium on Wednesday, located in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, according to a Sept. 9 press release.

The Syracuse Symposium is a semester-long exploration of the public humanities and is presented by the Syracuse University Humanities Center of the College of Arts and Sciences. The event is co-sponsored by the Goldring Arts Journalism Program, according to the release. The theme of this year’s symposium is identity.

Appiah is an author and a distinguished professor of philosophy and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, according to the release. Appiah has written about African and African-American intellectual history and political philosophy. He serves as president of the PEN American Center, which is the U.S. branch of the world’s oldest international literary and human rights organization.

Appiah is the author of ‘Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers’ and ‘The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen,’ published in 2006 and 2010, respectively, according to the release.

His book ‘Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers’ won the Arthur Ross Book Award in 2007. The award is the most significant prize given to a book on international affairs. Appiah was featured in the documentary ‘Examined Life’ in 2009 and was named one of Foreign Policy Magazine’s Top 100 public intellectuals, according to the release.

snbouvia@syr.edu