This paper returns to the final chapter of Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) and to the need of psychoanalysis — as a new science — to differentiate itself from so-called superstition. It does so with the following proposal in mind: there is superstition in psychoanalysis’s avoidance of superstition. This avoidance is first read on a temporal axis, as a relic from science’s longstanding aversion to superstition, which psychoanalysis inherits. Indeed, the latter looks for its scientific place less by projecting itself into a scientific future than by rehearsing a mythic, scientific past. Next, the paper interrogates the other, superstitious sense of the word “superstition” at work in Freud’s text, one that precisely proceeds through the word’s unsaying or unwording. Though Freud suspects superstition’s ties to widespread, “common” languages of interpretation, he nonetheless relies on the word’s passe-partout status to allow entry into the psychic apparatus. To understand how such “magical” or apotropaic dealings with words become entangled with the paths of scientific reasoning, the paper finally turns to Freud’s case study of the Rat Man, which invites a peripheral reading of Freud’s own reliance on superstition in his theoretical project of restaging the world on the endo-psychic stage.

Zeynep Aygun is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century literature and its criticism in the French and English traditions, with an additional focus on early cinema across national traditions. Methodologically, she takes her inspiration from approaches to classical rhetoric and psychoanalysis. Her current dissertation research examines superstition and its denunciations, with a focus on treatment of superstitious credence in 20th-century psychoanalysis and anthropology. In treating the theme of superstition, this work also aims to explore a series of recurring motifs including comets, gambling, and the evil eye. Aygun completed her undergraduate degree in English at Cambridge and earned an M.A. in Modern Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. (Bio composed by Michele Moghrabi)

This project revises our understanding of how 18th-century Christian discourse changed under the pressure of Enlightenment epistemology, and the role that the novel played in the process of this reaction formation. Traditional and influential histories of the Anglophone novel have argued that there is a causal relationship between the rise of empiricist epistemologies and the development of the novel as a form, and have suggested that novelistic realism in particular represents a definitive break with competing Christian epistemologies of revelation and inspiration. Through its case study of Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa, Or, the History of a Young Lady (1748), this project suggests that the realist novel might be understood instead as a discursive platform through which these competing epistemologies could be materialized and compared as objects of analysis through their embodiments in the lives of characters. Although this apparatus evinces clear influence from empiricist theories of knowledge, it also reveals how the techniques of novelistic realism allowed it to serve as a paradiscourse to propositional argument in which the “spiritual” dimensions of orthodox Christianity could be compared in terms of categorical equivalence with the practices of empiricism.

Jason Emmett Collins is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of English. His research focuses on late 18th- and 19th-century British and Irish fiction, with interdisciplinary interests in religious studies and music. Conjugating formalist and historically grounded approaches to the study of the novel, his work examines how religious discourses decisively inflect the creation of fictional worlds. His archeology of theological debates active in the British imperial context productively unsettles the long assumed complicity between secularization and modernity. It also reconsiders the novel as a privileged theatre in which to observe how religious polemics shape our ideas of nationhood and moral education. Collins holds a B.A. in English and History from the University of Southern California, where he was a Trustee Scholar, and an M.Phil. in English from the University of Cambridge, where he received the Gould Studentship in English Literature. His work has appeared in Religion and the Arts and George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies. (Bio composed by Zeynep Aygun)

This paper begins with Freud’s reflections on the relation between psychoanalysis and morality, and his question of whether we are morally responsible for unconscious psychic life. This question became a point of divergence in post-Freudian thought, in which psychoanalysis is alternately constructed as a tool of moral law or anti-moralist critique. More recently, the status of moral responsibility — and what might constitute “cure” — has become difficult to articulate amid a resurgence of interest in psychoanalysis as a resource for politically liberating forms of consciousness. The paper turns to the idea of attention, which in modern moral psychology became epistemologically and morally relevant, as a site for rethinking how the psychoanalytic idiom — and especially the unconscious — bears upon theories of moral responsibility. It explores “attention” in two post-war British thinkers, Iris Murdoch and Marion Milner, who offer distinct accounts of it as a basic condition for creative inquiry and life. What emerges is a theory of attention as a kind of perceptual iconoclasm. While Murdoch and Milner diverge with respect to the form this iconoclasm takes, read together they offer a powerful reframing of moral responsibility that gives a central role to the transformative possibilities of the visual arts.

Tessa Finley is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Religious Studies and a Collaborative Humanities Fellow at the Cogut Institute. Her work engages with questions of self-formation, drawing upon perspectives in the philosophy of religion, art and literature, psychoanalysis, and political theory. She is particularly interested in the transformation of moral thought in response to various historical expressions of secularization, skepticism, scientism, and atheism. Her dissertation research takes an interdisciplinary approach to the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of attention as a practice, and seeks to multiply and enrich the possibilities of thinking through atheism and divine absence. She holds a B.A. in Religious Studies and Biology from Pomona College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Oregon State University. Prior to coming to Brown, she taught composition at Tulane University. (Bio composed by Jason Emmett Collins)

This paper examines how Sara Eliassen’s multiscreen installation “Images [and Talking Back to Them]” (2024–2025) reconfigures the temporal logic through which violence is mediated. Rather than representing violence as an event that can be narrated, resolved, or contained, the work disrupts linear temporality through fragmentation, looping, and asynchronous duration. I argue that Eliassen’s installation produces what I call a temporal disruption: a reorganization of time that resists the closure imposed by dominant media regimes. Drawing on Sayak Valencia’s concept of gore capitalism and Judith Butler’s account of differential grievability, I situate the work within a context in which violence is both spectacularized and administratively managed. In contrast, Eliassen’s multiscreen form suspends narrative progression, placing the viewer within an ongoing present where images return without resolution. Through this durational encounter, spectatorship is transformed into a mode of embodied witnessing. Engaging theories of cinematic time (Doane) and testimony (Díaz), the paper proposes that the political potential of images lies not in their capacity to represent violence, but in their ability to reorganize how we remain with it.

Amanda Macedo Macedo is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies. Her research and teaching engage performance, film, and media arts through the lenses of cultural geography, transnational feminisms, decolonial thought, visual culture, and sound studies, with a particular focus on Latin American and Latinx diaspora communities in the United States. Her dissertation project, tentatively titled “Aesthetic Disturbances: Unraveling Resistance in the Face of Imperial Violence,” examines how imperial formations produce uneven distributions of death and exploitation across minoritarian bodies, with an emphasis on contemporary Mexico. Centering the body as a site of knowledge production and resistance, her work — spanning academic and public scholarship, curatorial practices, and collaborative projects — traces how aesthetic practices register, contest, and reconfigure experiences of violence. She is especially drawn to forms that mobilize radical imagination, subversion, and disruption to unsettle and challenge dominant structures of power. (Bio composed by Monica Futong Ren)

Over the last 50 years, the return of Plato as a figure of interest for Anglophone analytic philosophers has crystallized around a unified theory of Socratic Elenchus [refutation, examination]. In the footsteps of logical positivism, Vlastos, Irwin, Kraut, and Fine, among others, recognize Elenchus in what are often “aporetic” texts with a unified method for the production of distinctively Socratic theses. Moving against this tradition, this project theorizes Elenchus as activity over and against production. Identifying the interpretation by analytic commentators as sophistical, one that Platonism specifically warns us against in the Clitophon, the analysis moves to Crito, Laches, Lysias, and Euthyphro to sketch an alternative, where the virtue being sought is always being practiced in the very domain of dialogic activity. Even when aporia yields no extractable proposition, Socrates’ interlocutors practice what they fail to find in the speech of their very search: they search for courage courageously, for lawfulness lawfully, for love lovingly. Moving to Gorgias and Charmides, the paper explores Socrates’ resistance to any extrication of these truths beyond the bounds of dialogue, and the extent to which a notion of dialogue’s repetition as charm or incantation may allow for virtue to exceed the domain of Elenchus.

Michele Moghrabi is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature. Raised in France and Italy, he moved to the U.S. to pursue a B.A. in Philosophy at the University of Chicago and an M.A. in Philosophy at DePaul University. He specializes in Ancient Greek, French, and German literature. His dissertation research spans classical Greek philosophy, medicine, and tragedy, with a comparative perspective aimed toward the phenomenological and psychoanalytic traditions of the 20th century. More broadly, his comparative approach touches on literature in English, French, Italian, German, Latin, and Ancient Greek. (Bio composed by Armin Schneider)

This paper argues that Saartjie Baartman’s 2002 state funeral stages restitution as a mediated national performance that organizes visibility, authority, and memory, while displacing the violence it seeks to repair. Drawing on theories of visual regimes, necropolitics, and mediatization, it makes three central claims. First, the funeral assembles live broadcasting, spatial enclosure, and ceremonial sequencing into a coherent national narrative that stabilizes meaning out of historical fragmentation. Second, it reproduces elements of the scientific-spectacular logics to which Baartman was subjected, with political authority structuring spectatorship and organizing both what appears and how it becomes intelligible. Third, in President Mbeki’s address, political speech constructs a collective “we” and renders closure contingent upon the projected fantasy of a non-racial future within a still fractured post-apartheid society. The broadcast sequencing, fenced gravesite, and ceremonial inscription together operate less as a resolution than as a declaration of one, asserting closure and restored dignity in the absence of their material achievement. The funeral thus establishes a reproductive grammar of state repatriation that dictates how future Indigenous remains are processed, while the question of homecoming exceeds the fact of return, concerning instead the terms under which the dead remain politically usable for the state.

Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Modern Culture and Media, and is concurrently pursuing an Open M.A. in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. His work spans artistic and curatorial practice, film programming, Black studies, and critical social theory, with a focus on art history, film and media studies, and performance studies. Before joining Brown, he worked at the Iziko South African National Gallery. His work has been presented internationally, including at the Rencontres de Bamako, Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Zeitz MOCAA. (Bio composed by Amanda Macedo Macedo)

Postsocialist China implemented a series of draconian population planning measures beginning in the 1980s, most notably the nationwide one-child policy. This project builds on existing scholarship on China’s population policymaking and mobilization campaigns, but complicates the top-down social engineering narrative by examining how visual and media practices constructed “population” as a technocratic, pedagogical problem. Taking the state-produced science education film Family Planning (1983) as its primary object, this paper analyzes how statistics, visual knowledge, and documentary media — across television, propaganda, and education programs — facilitated an empiricist scientization of reproductive management at the historical juncture between socialism and market reform. A new audiovisual culture emerged as pedagogical technology to shift the problem of population from Marxian-Maoist social science to a technocratic paradigm grounded in the purportedly neutral science of cybernetics. Media practices not only rationalize state intervention through scientific objectivity, but also attempt to construct new economic subjectivity and knowledge about the value of life — individual and aggregate — across political discourse, representational regimes, and experiential orders of the everyday. Situated within a global context of biopolitical management and neoliberalism, the paper shows that the film indexes a repertoire of epistemological mediation through which life is rendered calculable, governable, and optimizable.

Monica Futong Ren is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Modern Culture and Media. She holds an M.A. in Cinema and Media Studies and a B.A. in Art History and Visual Arts from the University of Chicago. Her research interests include film and media studies, psychoanalysis, design culture, built environments, and STS. (Bio composed by Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose)

The text takes up a phrase from Aesop – Hic Rhodus, hic saltus – which Hegel quotes in the preface to his Elements of the Philosophy of Right in order to determine philosophy to be its time grasped in thought. Asking for the possibility of following this determination today, the text asks for the place of philosophy in relation to the place of politics in the contemporary moment, and how these places and their relation have been accounted for in the past: a) accounted for by Hamacher and Badiou in 1984 and 1991 in Paris, in the diagnosis of a ceasing of philosophy and in its reaffirmation, b) accounted for by Hegel himself in 1801 and 1820 in Jena and Berlin, in the articulation of the need of philosophy and in its determination by way of Aesop’s phrase. In this way the text seeks to open a place for philosophy by turning the contingency of a name into a necessity of thought.

Armin Schneider is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Integrative Studies program, working between the Departments of Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and Modern Culture and Media. His research interests include the philosophy of Hegel, contemporary continental philosophy, and ancient Greek and early modern philosophy. His dissertation project investigates the concept of becoming in Hegel’s Science of Logic in juxtaposition with questions originating from the fields of poetry (Hölderlin), logic and set theory, psychoanalysis, and politics. In addition to this philosophical work, he has an intellectual background in German studies, cultural studies, and the history of science and technology, among other fields. His paper “Preliminaries. Badiou, Hegel, Parmenides” was recently published in Crisis & Critique. Prior to his doctoral work at Brown, he received a B.A. in Media Studies and an M.A. in Cultural Studies from Humboldt University Berlin. (Bio composed by Tessa Finley)

Nadje Al-Ali is Robert Family Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies at Brown University. Her research interests revolve around feminist activism and gendered mobilization, mainly with reference to Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, and the Kurdish political movement. Her publications include What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (University of California Press, 2009, co-authored with Nicola Pratt) and Women and War in the Middle East: Transnational Perspectives (Zed Books, 2009, edited with Nicola Pratt). Her co-edited book with Deborah al-Najjar — We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics & Politics in a Time of War (Syracuse University Press, 2013) — won the 2014 Arab-American Book Award for non-fiction. Recent publications include (with Deniz Kandiyoti and Kathryn Spellman Poots) Gender, Governance & Islam (University of Edinburgh Press, 2019) and (edited with Tunay Altay and Katharina Galor) Resisting Far-Right Politics in the Middle East and Europe: Queer Feminist Critiques (University of Edinburgh Press, 2024).

Amanda Anderson is Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities at Brown University. Her research focuses on broad questions of intellectual history, disciplinary formation, and the relations among literature, moral life, and politics. Her books include Humanities Theory (Oxford University Press, 2025; with Simon During), Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies (University of Chicago Press, TRIOS series, 2019; with Rita Felski and Toril Moi), Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life After Psychology (Oxford University Press, Clarendon Lectures in English Literature, 2018), Bleak Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2016), The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton University Press, 2006), The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton University Press, 2001), and Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Cornell University Press, 1993). She is co-editor of George Eliot: A Companion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (Princeton University Press, 2002).

Kenneth Haynes is Professor of Comparative Literature and Classics at Brown University. He has written English Literature and Ancient Languages (Oxford University Press, 2003) and (co-edited with Peter France) The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 4: 1790–1900 (2006). Other books include a translation of Heidegger (with Julian Young), an edition of Swinburne, and (with D.S. Carne-Ross) a historical anthology of English translations of Horace. He has translated and published on the philosopher Johann Georg Hamann, and edited and written on the poetry and criticism of Geoffrey Hill. He was the editor of The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 5: After 1880 (2019). Current projects include the forthcoming critical edition of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos, co-edited with Ronald Bush, and the digital project Lives and Pseudonyms of Literary Scholars 1849–1949, identifying and sketching biographies of contributors to Notes and Queries. 

Tracy McNulty is Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies at Cornell University and a psychoanalyst in private practice. She is the author of The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity (Minnesota University Press, 2006), Wrestling with the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life (Columbia University Press, 2014), and, most recently, Links in a Chain: Unconscious Transmission and the Transindividual Subject of Psychoanalysis (forthcoming later this year from SUNY Press).

Paul North is Maurice Natanson Professor of German and Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of several books, including The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation (Stanford University Press, 2015) and Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe: The Logic of Likeness (Zone Books, 2021), and is co-editor of the new English translation of Karl Marx’s Capital, vol. 1 (Princeton University Press, 2024).

Marc Redfield is Florence Pirce Grant University Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Professor of German Studies at Brown University. He taught at the Université de Genève, Switzerland, for four years and Claremont Graduate University for 20 years before moving to Brown in 2010. He studies British, American, French, and German literature and literary theory of the 18th through 20th centuries, with a particular focus on romanticism and on intersections of literature and philosophy. He is the author of Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Cornell University Press, 1996), The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 2003), The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror (Fordham University Press, 2009), Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America (Fordham University Press, 2016), and Shibboleth: Judges, Derrida, Celan (Fordham University Press, 2021). He has recently completed a book titled Homeless Hospitality: Kant, Kafka, Lispector.