Archive of Selected Events

 

See here for the series "A Book That Changed My Mind: Conversations with Writers and Thinkers."

 

Spring 2011

Lecture: Thomas Pfau (Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English and Professor of German, Duke University), "'A certain mediocrity': Moral Sentiments and Early Behaviorism in A. Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments."

Symposium: "Heidegger / Aristotle"

Steve Crowell (Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor of Philosophy, Rice University), "Heidegger on Practical Reasoning: Morality and Agency."
Burt Hopkins (Professor of Philosophy, Seattle University), "The Philosophy of Husserl."
François Raffoul (Professor of French Studies, Louisiana State University), "Factical Life and the Need for Philosophy."

Fall 2011

Lecture: Joan Copjec (Professor of English and Comparative Literature; Director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture, University of Buffalo), "The Fate of the Image: Church History and the Modern State."

Lecture: Diane Rubenstein (Professor of Government, Cornell University), "A Most Inhospitable Discipline: Jacques Derrida and the 'Political Science to Come.'"

Spring 2012

Lecture: Andrew Feenberg (Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology, Simon Fraser University), "Agency and Citizenship in a Technological Society."

Lecture: N. Katherine Hayles (Professor of Literature, Duke University), "The Technogenetic Spiral: Implications and Interventions."

Lecture: James Conant (Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy, Univ. of Chicago), "From Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to Philosophical Investigations: The Evolution in Wittgenstein's Conception of the Form of his Philosophical Authorship."

 

Fall 2012

Symposium: "Theories of the Political I: Weber, Schmitt, and Strauss"

Douglas Moggach (Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, University of Ottawa), "Synthesizing the Multiple: Theoretical, Ethical, and Aesthetic Unities."
Tracy Strong (Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Univ. of California, San Diego), "Max Weber: The Theory, Ethics and Politics of Social Scientific Objectivity."

Symposium: "Theories of the Political II: Althusser and After"

Warren Montag (Brown Family Professor in Literature, English and Comparative Literary Studies, Occidental College), "From Interpellation to Immunization: Althusser, Balibar, Esposito."
Ellen Rooney (Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Professor of English, Brown University), "I am interested in the play on words itself: The Reading of Theory."

 

Spring 2013

Lecture: Irad Kimhi (Assoc. Professor, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago), "The Philosophical and the Poetic: The Knowledge of Happiness and the Knowledge of Suffering."
Seminar: Irad Kimhi on Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, and Endgame.

Lecture: Paul North (Assoc. Professor of German, Yale University), "The Phenomenality of the State: Kafka and Plato."

Symposium: "Poetic Thinking, Thinking Death"

Cathy Caruth (Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, Cornell University), "After the End: Psychoanalysis in the Ashes of History."
Shoshana Felman (Woodruff Professor of Comparative Literature and French, Emory University), "Writing in the Face of Death: Barbara Johnson's Last Work ('Mary Shelley and her Circle')."

Fall 2013

Forum: Joshua Kates (English), "Archimedes, Historicity, and Holism."

Lecture: Joseph Vogl (Professor of Literary, Cultural, and Media Studies, Humboldt University Berlin), "On Tarrying."

Lecture: Michael Warner (Seymour H. Knox Professor of English & Professor of American Studies, Yale University), "Normativity and Its Vicissitudes."
Seminar: Michael Warner on Georges Canguilhem's "Normality and Normativity," published in A Vital Rationalist.

Forum: Patricia Clare Ingham (English), “Newfangled Value,” Introduction to The Medieval New: Novelty, Innovation, Ethics

Spring 2014

Forum: Kevin Houser (Philosophy), "The Ethical Origins of Objectivity."

Symposium: "Style, Ethos, Image I"

Taylor Carman Professor of (Philosophy, Barnard College), "Merleau-Ponty on Painting and the Promiscuity of Vision."
Jennifer Fleissner (Assoc. Professor of English, Indiana), "Romancing the Real: Ian McEwan's Enduring Love."

Symposium: "Style, Ethos, Image II"

John Plotz (Professor of English, Brandeis University), "The Great Stoneface and His Hats: Buster Keaton’s Style."
Daniel Morgan (Asst. Professor of Cinema & Media Studies, University of Chicago), "The Morals of Style."
Anne-Lise François (Assoc. Professor of Comparative Literature/English, UC Berkeley), “'Je sauterai le bonheur': Signing Happiness and the Staccato of Stendhalian Style.”

Lecture: Boris Groys (Global Distinguished Professor, New York University), "The Inside View: Aesthetics of the Gesamtkunstwerk."
Seminar: Boris Groyson curating digital art.

Forum: Patrick Dove (Spanish/Portuguese), “October 17th, 1945: Aesthetics and Politics at the Origins of Peronism in Argentina.”

Fall 2014

Symposium: “Hans Blumenberg’s Concept of Modernity”

Rüdiger Campe (German, Yale University): “The Background of the Metaphor: Historicity Through Implication.”
Jane O. Newman (Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine): “Early / Modern: Augustine between Blumenberg and Auerbach.”
Kirk Wetters (German, Yale University): “Science or Philosophy? — Blumenberg&tsquo;s Critical Anti-Anti-Positivism.”
C.D. Blanton (English, University of California, Berkeley): “Reoccupying Metaphor: On the Legitimacy of the Nonconceptual.”

Forum: Jennifer Fleissner (English), “The Embarrassment of Being a Subject: From St. Paul to Internet Porn”

Conversation: Ben Robinson (Germanic Studies), “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Marx (But Were Afraid to Ask)”

Spring 2015

Conversation: Eyal Peretz (Comparative Literature), “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Freud (But Were Afraid to Ask)”

Forum: Eyal Peretz (Comparative Literature), “The Birth of the Off-Screen out of the Ghost of Modernity”

Symposium: “Security, Violence Law”

John Hamilton (German / Comparative Literature, Harvard): “Liberalism, Libertinage, and the Limits of Security: Laclos and the Charlie Hebdo Massacre”
Chantal Mouffe (Politics and International Relations, Univ. of Westminster): “Politics and Violence: An Agonistic Approach”
Elizabeth Anker (English, Cornell Univ.), “The Human Rights Turn, or the Political Will of Critical Theory”

Fall 2015

Conversation: Constance Furey (Religious Studies) and Sonia Velázquez (Religious Studies and Comparative Literature), “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God (But Were Afraid to Ask)”

Lecture Series: “The Working Subject”

Marc Doussard (UIUC), “What Comes after the Minimum Wage? The Struggle to Define Good Jobs After Fordism”
Walter Benn Michaels (UIC), “What Academic Work is For”
Kathi Weeks (Duke University), “Loving Work”
Jakob Norberg (Duke University), “Anti-Capitalist Affect: Georg Lukacs on Hate”
David Henkin (UC Berkeley), “Welcome to the Working Week: Rhythms and Regimes in Nineteenth-Century America”

Spring 2016

Lecture Series: “The Working Subject”

Lilly Irani (UC San Diego), “Hackathons and the Making of Entrepreneurial Citizenship.”

Symposium: Poststructuralism and Ordinary Language Philosophy

Geoffrey Bennington (Emory University), “‘Différance is Reference’: Derrida and Frege.”
Peter Fenves (Northwestern University), “From ‘Ousia’ to ‘Singular Terms.’”
Paul Grimstad (Independent Scholar), “The Whole Whirl of Organism: Notes on Natural Language, Discourse and Persons.”
Toril Moi (Duke University), “Signs, Marks, and Archie Bunker: Post-Saussurean Visions of Language.”

Conversation: Jennifer Fleissner (English, IU), "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Feminism (But Were Afraid To Ask)"

Symposium: Amor Mundi: On Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition

Linda Marie-Gelsomina Zerilli (Univ. of Chicago), "Judging and the Common World."
Gabriela Basterra (New York University), "The Power of Thinking Together."
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft (MIT), "Arendt and the Problem of the Public Intellectual."
Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (Georgetown University), "The Singer and the Tale: Arendt's Defense of Poetry."

Fall 2016

Symposium: Thinking With Derrida

Peggy McCracken (University of Michigan), “Metamorphosis and Living Death.”
Katie Chenoweth (Princeton University), “‘The Print of my own Foot’: Three Books from Derrida’s Library.”
David Wills (Brown University), “The Sovereign Time of Terror.”
Panel discussions with Patricia C. Ingham (English, IU), Nazareth Pantaloni III (IU Libraries), Johannes Türk (Germanic Studies, IU), Jacob Emery (Comparative Literature & Slavic, IU), Izabela Potapowicz (French & Italian, IU), and Lucas Wood (French & Italian, IU).

 

Spring 2017

Lecture Series: Struggling for Life. A Constellation of Events

Jan Mieszkowski (Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Reed College), "Death Sentences."
Timothy Campbell (Romance Languages, Cornell University), “The Comic Self.”
Adam Sitze (Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, Amherst College), "Biopolitics and its Discontents."
Banu Bargu (Politics, New School for Social Research), "Police Power: Rethinking the State and the Subject."

Forum: Ilana Gershon (Anthropology) and John McGlothlin (English) discuss their pre-circulated paper "The Animated Turn: On Literature and Capital."

 

Fall 2017

Symposium: The Persistence of Art: T. W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory

Espen Hammer (Professor of Philosophy, Temple University), "Thinking of Being versus Dialectical Negativism: Adorno’s Critique of Heidegger."
Sianne Ngai (Professor of English, University of Chicago), “Transparency and Enigma in the Gimmick as Capitalist Form.”
Surti Singh (Assistant Professor of Philosophy, American University in Cairo), “Adorno’s Theory of Aesthetic Play.”
Christopher Wood (Professor of German, New York University), “Good Form and Bad Form.”
Adrian Daub (Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Stanford University), “Tone, Color, Program — Mimesis and Metaphysical Experience in 19th Century Music.”

 

Spring 2018

Discussion with Graham Harman (Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Southern California Institute of Architecture, Los Angeles): “Object-Oriented Ontology and Aesthetics.”

Discussion with Michael Burawoy (Professor of Sociology, University of California at Berkeley): “Bringing Theory to the Everyday.”

Symposium: Unaccountable Differences: On Jean-François Lyotard's The Differend

Claire Nouvet (Assoc. Professor of French and Italian, Emory Univ.), “The Silences of the Differend.”
Kiff Bamford (Reader in Contemporary Art, School of Art, Architecture and Design, Leeds Beckett University), “‘No phrase is the first.’§184.”
Hélène Merlin-Kajman (Professor of French, Sorbonne Nouvelle), “Is Lyotard’s Theory of the Differend a Relativistic Theory?”
Margret Grebowicz, “Inner Life and Amnesty: The Case of Cetaceans.”
David Ingram (Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University of Chicago), “Disputing Law: A Lyotardian Reflexion on Unresolvable Injustices.”

 

Fall 2018

Lecture series on Play

Sergio Pellis, (Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Lethbridge), “Social Play and the Development of Social Skills: A Comparative Perspective on the Essential Experiences.”

Alexander Galloway (Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University), “The Crystalline Medium: Computation and Its Consequences.”

Alva Noë (Professor of Philosophy, the University of California, Berkeley), "Three Styles of Seeing."

 

Spring 2019

Symposium: “The Other Beginning? History and Modernity in Heidegger’s Beiträge” 

William McNeill (Philosophy, DePaul University), “What is Wrong with Phenomenology? From Being and Time to the Beiträge.
Krzysztof Ziarek (Comparative Literature, SUNY-Buffalo), “The Strength of Thinking.”
Richard Polt (Philosophy, Xavier University), “Inception and Catastrophe in the Beiträge and the Black Notebooks.”
Dana S. Belu (Philosophy, California State University Dominguez Hills), “Losing the Machine: From Machenschaft to Ge-stell.”
Alberto Moreiras (Hispanic Studies, Texas A&M University), “On Presentiment: Anticipating the Other Beginning.”
Andrew Mitchell (Philosophy, Emory University), “Where Does the Beiträge Begin?”

 

Fall 2019

Presentation of the Theory Center Graduate Essay Prize

Josie Wenig (Dept. of Religious Studies), "Willing the Body: Sovereignty, Transition, and Ascetic Transformation."

Symposium: "An Excess of Seeing: The Pasts, Presents and Futures of Mikhail Bakhtin"

Richard Bauman (Folklore and Anthropology, Indiana University), “The Bakhtin Circle and American Linguistic Anthropology.”
Ruth Coates (Russian Studies, University of Bristol), “Mikhail Bakhtin and the Russian Religious Philosophical Tradition: Dialogue, Polemic, or Silence?”
Ilya Kliger (Russian and Slavic Studies, New York University), “Bakhtin’s Social Imaginaries: From ‘Choral Support’ to ‘Genre Memory.’”
Martha Kelly (Russian Studies, University of Missouri), “Afterlives of ‘Answerability in Late- and Post-Soviet Russia.”
Alina Wyman (Russian Literature, New College of Florida), “Which Bakhtin? Continuity and Change in Mikhail Bakhtin’s Conceptual Framework between the Early and Middle Periods.”

 

Fall 2020

Lecture Series on Neoliberalism

Sandro Mezzadra (Political TheoryUniversity of Bologna), “The Politics of Coronavirus: Investigating the Future of Neoliberalism.”

Verónica Gago (Political Science, University of Buenos Aires), "Neoliberalism and Violence: Lessons from the Feminist Revolts."

Gabriel Rockhill (Philosophy, Villanova University), “Counter-History of Fascism & Liberalism.”

 

Spring 2021

Lecture Series on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations

Sarah Beckwith (English, Duke University), “A Vision of Language for Literary Historians."

Juliet Floyd (Philosophy, Boston University), "The 'Machine; Self-Symbolizing Its Own Actions."

Presentation of the Theory Center Graduate Essay Prize

Sara Loy (English), “‘Battle of the Thermostat’: Thermal Comfort and the Feminist Response.”

 

Fall 2021

Events around Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex

Nancy Bauer, “Setting Out to Read The Second Sex.”

Virtual screening of Pour Djamila (For Djamila) (2011), directed by Caroline Huppert.

Symposium: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations

Steven Affeldt (Le Moyne College), “‘As if I could read the darkness’: (Some) Stakes of Reading in Philosophical Investigations.”
Henry Staten (University of Washington), “How Stanley Cavell Misled Toril Moi About Wittgenstein.”

 

Spring 2022

Symposium on Édouard Glissant: Poetics of Relation

Silvio Torres-Saillant (English, Syracuse University),“The West as a Project and History as Poesis.”
H. Adlai Murdoch (French, Tufts University), “From Antillanité to the Archipelic: Edouard Glissant’s Linked Insularities of Non-Continental Thought.”
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel (University of Miami), “Caribbean Confederations as Relationalities: Politics and Erotics of Archipelagic Thinking.”
John E. Drabinski African American Studies and Comparative Literature, (University of Maryland), “Shoreline, Auction Block: Origin Stories and the Afterlife of Violence.”

Other Events around Reading Édouard Glissant

Lecture: Carles Forsdick (French, University of Liverpool), “Spectres of the Revolution: Glissant and Haiti.”

Fall 2022

Lectures related to Michael Silverstein's Work

Michael Lucey (University of California, Berkeley), “Proust, Speech Acts, and Language Ideologies.” 

Bonnie Urciuoli (Hamilton College), “Neoliberal Diversity: What it is and what it isn’t.”

Francis Cody (University of Toronto), “Law at Large: Notes on the Public Mediation of Community in the Juridical Field.”

Rosetta Young (Darmouth College), “Profitable Speech: The Nineteenth-Century Novel, the Upper Middle Class, and Social Indexicality.”

 

Spring 2023

Michel de Certeau Symposium

Amy Hollywood (Harvard University) “Michel de Certeau’s Mystic Romance”

Niklaus Largier (University of California Berkeley), “Overture for a Poetics of the Body”

Brenna Moore (Fordham University), “Love, Exorcism, and Exchange in de Certeau’s Possession of Loudun”

Kris Trujillo (University of Chicago), “De Certeau’s Opera of Speech”

Iain Cunningham (Slavics, IU), “Fictions and Joyful Reading”

Hannah Garvey (Religious Studies, IU), “Opaque Wanderings, or de Certeau on Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights”

Alina Williams (Religious Studies, IU), “Prayer and Praying”

Marianne Kielian-Gilbert (Jacobs School of Music, IU), “The oxymoron in de Certeau’s mystic science, a micro-(musical)-laboratory”

Nazareth Pantaloni (Indiana University Libraries), “The Baruzi-Maritain Debate on the Mystical”

Robert Schneider (History, IU), “Uncertain about de Certeau”

J. Kameron Carter (Religious Studies, IU), “Is de Certeau Playing in the Dark? A Morrisonian Question”

New Book Presentation

Jennifer Fleissner, Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

Graduate Essay Prize Award and Presentation

Robert Metaxatos (English), “(Im)pure Immanence: The Philosophy of Life in Gilles Deleuze and Fred Moten.”

Honorable Mention
Jaehoon Lee (English), “O-o-o-o-da Blues: The Birth of Music in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.”

 

Fall 2023

New Book Presentation

Akin Adeṣọkan, Everything Is Sampled: Print and Digital Mediations in African Arts and Letters (Indiana University Press, 2023)

Jeffrey Saletnik, Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form (University of Chicago Press, 2023).

Sonia Velázquez, Promiscuous Grace: Imagining Beauty and Holiness with Saint Mary of Egypt (University of Chicago Press, 2023).

 

Spring 2024

William Slaymaker Graduate Essay Prize in Critical Theory

Nicolas Noé (French): "Spirals of Emancipation: Frankétienne’s Exhausting Intermedial Schizophony and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Ex-haussement of Reason"

Honorable Mention:
Hoon Lee (English Department), "The 'Lyric' Mode of Address in Being and Time"

Symposium: Reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit Today

Todd McGowan (University of Vermont), “Thinking from the End: Reading the Phenomenology Backwards.”
Robert Lucas Scott (University of Cambridge), “Representing Spirit: Recollection and Figuration in Hegel’s Phenomenology.”
Angelica Nuzzo (City University of New York), “‘Figures of Consciousness’ and ‘Figures of the World’: The Notion of Gestalt in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.”
Jensen Suther (Harvard Society of Fellows), “The Desire for Desire: Hegel’s Constitutive Model of Rationality in Chapter IV.”
Dean Moyar (Johns Hopkins University), “‘Spirit is a Bone’: The Poorest and Richest Judgment in the Phenomenology of Spirit.”
Rocío Zambrana (University of Puerto Rico), “On Fetishism.”