Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Conferences and Symposia

Upcoming Events

  • We have been witnessing the undoing of democracy for some time now. This description is not an autopsy; it should also be read as an urgent call for action. The ends of democracy — its goals, what gives it its sense and meaning — require a rethinking.

    We invite 400- to 600-word abstracts for a single concept that helps thinking about, revising, or questioning these concerns. Only concepts (usually one or two words) are admitted as titles. 

    Free, open to the public. The event is presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and convened by Timothy Bewes, Ainsley LeSure, Brian Meeks, Adi Ophir, and Vazira Zamindar.

    Read the call for paper and submit an abstract
  • We have been witnessing the undoing of democracy for some time now. This description is not an autopsy; it should also be read as an urgent call for action. The ends of democracy — its goals, what gives it its sense and meaning — require a rethinking.

    We invite 400- to 600-word abstracts for a single concept that helps thinking about, revising, or questioning these concerns. Only concepts (usually one or two words) are admitted as titles. 

    Free, open to the public. The event is presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and convened by Timothy Bewes, Ainsley LeSure, Brian Meeks, Adi Ophir, and Vazira Zamindar.

    Read the call for paper and submit an abstract

Previous Events

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Andrews HouseRoom: 110

    We always read for . We might have forgotten it since we imagine reading as mainly silent and solitary. But think about how, in a more or less distant past, readers used to read aloud for someone who listened; think about today’s audiobooks; think about the other part of us, in us, that is lending an ear when we apparently read only for ourselves.

    We always read for . In other words, there is always an addressee of reading whose place or role could be central to thinking about any politics or economies of reading. There have been many theories of reading — close reading, symptomatic reading, distant, surface, just, or reparative reading, to name just a few. Shifting the emphasis away from the face-to-face between reader and text could open or reopen, in the very act or scene of reading, a space for alterity, for futurity, for responsibility towards the other.

    Speakers included:

    • Emily Apter, Julius Silver Professor of French Literature, Thought, and Culture and Comparative Literature (New York University)
    • Erin Graff Zivin, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature and Director of the Experimental Humanities Lab (University of Southern California, Dornsife)
    • Emily Greenwood, James M. Rothenberg Professor of the Classics and of Comparative Literature (Harvard University)
    • Daniel Heller-Roazen, Arthur W. Marks 1919 Professor of Comparative Literature and the Council of the Humanities (Princeton University)
    • Jesse McCarthy, Assistant Professor of English and of African and African American Studies (Harvard University)
    • Rosalind C. Morris, Professor of Anthropology (Columbia University)
    • Paul North, ​​Maurice Natanson Professor, Germanic Languages and Literatures (Yale University)
    • Leah Price, Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the Rutgers Initiative for the Book (Rutgers University)
    • Thomas Schestag, Professor of German Studies (Brown University)

    Presented by the Economies of Aesthetics Initiative at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, convened by Peter Szendy.

    Conference schedule, abstracts, and bios
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Andrews HouseRoom: 110

    We always read for. We might have forgotten it since we imagine reading as mainly silent and solitary. But think about how, in a more or less distant past, readers used to read aloud for someone who listened; think about today’s audiobooks; think about the other part of us, in us, that is lending an ear when we apparently read only for ourselves.

    We always read for. In other words, there is always an addressee of reading whose place or role could be central to thinking about any politics or economies of reading. There have been many theories of reading — close reading, symptomatic reading, distant, surface, just, or reparative reading, to name just a few. Shifting the emphasis away from the face-to-face between reader and text could open or reopen, in the very act or scene of reading, a space for alterity, for futurity, for responsibility towards the other.

    Speakers included:

    • Emily Apter, Julius Silver Professor of French Literature, Thought, and Culture and Comparative Literature (New York University)
    • Erin Graff Zivin, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature and Director of the Experimental Humanities Lab (University of Southern California, Dornsife)
    • Emily Greenwood, James M. Rothenberg Professor of the Classics and of Comparative Literature (Harvard University)
    • Daniel Heller-Roazen, Arthur W. Marks 1919 Professor of Comparative Literature and the Council of the Humanities (Princeton University)
    • Jesse McCarthy, Assistant Professor of English and of African and African American Studies (Harvard University)
    • Rosalind C. Morris, Professor of Anthropology (Columbia University)
    • Paul North, ​​Maurice Natanson Professor, Germanic Languages and Literatures (Yale University)
    • Leah Price, Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the Rutgers Initiative for the Book (Rutgers University)
    • Thomas Schestag, Professor of German Studies (Brown University)

    Presented by the Economies of Aesthetics Initiative at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, convened by Peter Szendy.

    Conference schedule, abstracts, and bios
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    The Collaborative Public Workshop features seven Brown University doctoral candidates presenting papers developed over the course of the semester in the capstone seminar of the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities:

    • Istifaa Ahmed (American Studies)
    • Kamari Carter (Music and Multimedia Composition)
    • Sneha Chowdhury (Comparative Literature)
    • Yannick Etoundi (History of Art and Architecture)
    • Will Johnson (Music and Multimedia Composition)
    • Jay Loomis (Musicology and Ethnomusicology)
    • Prudence Ross (English)

    Free and open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.


    Schedule

    9:30 am – 10:00 am

    Coffee

    10:00 am – 11:45 am

    Introduction by Amanda Anderson

    Session 1

    • Prudence Ross, “‘Space May Produce New Worlds’: Architecture as Resistance in Paradise Lost
      Commentators: Caroline Levine and Peter Szendy
    • Yannick Etoundi, “Abolishing Slavery, Building French Colonialism: Guadeloupe and Martinique, 1848–1900”
      Commentators: Caroline Levine and Alexander Weheliye
    • Moderator: Shahzad Bashir
    1:00 pm – 2:45 pm

    Session 2

    • Istifaa Ahmed, “Touch Me After the End of the World: Touch, Dehiscence, and Inhuman Intimacies in Octavia Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’”
      Commentators: Uri McMillan and Peter Szendy
    • Sneha Chowdhury, “Hölderlin, Agyeya, and the Third Step of Poetry”
      Commentators: Caroline Levine and Peter Szendy
    • Moderator: Shahzad Bashir
    2:45 pm – 3:15 pm

    Coffee

    3:15 pm – 5:30 pm

    Session 3

    • Will Johnson, “Listening and Processing: The Ghetto Riots as Sound, Score, and Interpellative Media”
      Commentators: Uri McMillan and Peter Szendy
    • Jay Loomis, “Son Jarocho Communities and Fandango Culture: The Black Atlantic in Southern Veracruz”
      Commentators: Uri McMillan and Alexander Weheliye
    • Kamari Carter, “Black Artists, Protest Practices, and Activist Exhibitions: An Analysis of Institutional Exhibiting and Protest Art in New York City”
      Commentators: Uri McMillan and Alexander Weheliye
    • Moderator: Amanda Anderson

    About the Seminar

    The spring 2024 Project Development Workshop (HMAN 2500) is led by Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English and Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of History. Over the course of the semester, students each develop and workshop a paper while performing a number of collateral academic roles: they nominate and introduce a text to the seminar that was formative for their scholarly development; they serve as first questioners for papers workshopped by others; and they interview one of their peers and prepare an introduction to their work. By providing training and preparation for roles that are crucial to the practice and fabric of academic life, yet are seldom the object of formal study and reflection, the seminar reimagines the conditions and extends the limits of an interdisciplinary and collaborative research space.

    About the Doctoral Certificate

    The Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities promotes cross-disciplinary work oriented toward the most challenging questions facing humanities research today. Collaboration is built through research practices dedicated to thinking together across disciplines and geographical locations. Participants pursue these forms of inquiry through teaching models and student practices that experiment with group presentations, collaborative online discussions, coauthored seminar papers, and other forms of intellectual partnership.

    Abstracts and bios
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    In the last half century the categories of fiction and autobiography have been destabilized by a series of practices that center a more and more loosely identifiable first person. Classic forms of fiction and autobiography appear increasingly marginalized in favor of “creative nonfiction,” “auto-fiction,” “auto-theory,” and “critical fabulation.”

    Overlapping with this literary trend is a troubling of the distinction between truth and fiction, evident in phenomena as different as the credibility of documentary and mediatized fact and challenges to authentic creation by artificial intelligence. It might be argued that the convergence of auto-inflected writing and fictionalized fact signal an epistemic shift as significant as Descartes’ thinking “I.”

    “Why Me?” was a two-day colloquium that assembled writers and thinkers to examine the intellectual and epistemological impact of a reliance on first-person narration, or relation, that operates on the shifting sands of both subject formation and objective reality.


    The event was hosted by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities with the support of a Faculty Seed Grant from the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women; the Departments of Comparative Literature, English, French and Francophone Studies, Hispanic Studies, Literary Arts, and Theatre Arts and Performance Studies; the Humanities Initiative Programming Fund; and the Charles K. Colver Lectureships and Publications. It was convened by Timothy Bewes and David Wills with Michelle Clayton and Kevin Quashie.

    See colloquium website for video recordings
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    In the last half century the categories of fiction and autobiography have been destabilized by a series of practices that center a more and more loosely identifiable first person. Classic forms of fiction and autobiography appear increasingly marginalized in favor of “creative nonfiction,” “auto-fiction,” “auto-theory,” and “critical fabulation.”

    Overlapping with this literary trend is a troubling of the distinction between truth and fiction, evident in phenomena as different as the credibility of documentary and mediatized fact and challenges to authentic creation by artificial intelligence. It might be argued that the convergence of auto-inflected writing and fictionalized fact signal an epistemic shift as significant as Descartes’ thinking “I.”

    “Why Me?” was a two-day colloquium that assembled writers and thinkers to examine the intellectual and epistemological impact of a reliance on first-person narration, or relation, that operates on the shifting sands of both subject formation and objective reality.


    The event was hosted by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities with the support of a Faculty Seed Grant from the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women; the Departments of Comparative Literature, English, French and Francophone Studies, Hispanic Studies, Literary Arts, and Theatre Arts and Performance Studies; the Humanities Initiative Programming Fund; and the Charles K. Colver Lectureships and Publications. It was convened by Timothy Bewes and David Wills with Michelle Clayton and Kevin Quashie.

    See colloquium website for video recordings
  •  Location: Stephen Robert ’62 Campus CenterRoom: Petteruti Lounge

    This workshop sought to engage with the burgeoning scholarship on French and Francophone ideas and ideologies of race, Blackness (“négritude” in French), and the economic foundations of the transatlantic slave trade, in the context of inter-imperial rivalries and colonization schemes from Africa to the Americas. By inviting leading scholars from France and the United States and throughout the Francophone world to engage with these questions through a day-long symposium in Providence (with a keynote lecture the evening prior), the workshop highlighted the work of historians, literary scholars, anthropologists and sociologists who have been at the vanguard of these new histories and whose scholarship has advanced our understanding of newly articulated geographies of enslavement.


    This workshop was supported by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States and partially funded by the Pierre and Mary Ann Sorel Fund for French Studies, the Mollie B. Mandeville Lectureship Fund, and the Herbert H. Goldberg Lectureship Fund. It was cosponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. The keynote was also co-sponsored by the Department of History, and the Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.

    Convened by Neil Safier, director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and associate professor of history.

    Image: “Plan, Profile, and Layout of the Ship The Marie Séraphique of Nantes…”, 1770, Musée d’Histoire de Nantes

    Full workshop schedule
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    This keynote lecture opened “France and the Black Atlantic: Geographies of Slavery and Memory,” a workshop that sought to engage with the burgeoning scholarship on French and Francophone ideas and ideologies of race, Blackness (“négritude” in French), and the economic foundations of the transatlantic slave trade, in the context of inter-imperial rivalries and colonization schemes from Africa to the Americas. By inviting leading scholars from France and the United States and throughout the Francophone world to engage with these questions through a day-long symposium in Providence, the workshop highlighted the work of historians, literary scholars, anthropologists and sociologists who have been at the vanguard of these new histories and whose scholarship has advanced our understanding of newly articulated geographies of enslavement.


    This workshop was supported by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States and partially funded by the Pierre and Mary Ann Sorel Fund for French Studies, the Mollie B. Mandeville Lectureship Fund, and the Herbert H. Goldberg Lectureship Fund. It was cosponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. The keynote was also cosponsored by the Department of History, and the Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.

    Convened by Neil Safier, director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and associate professor of history.

    Full workshop schedule
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    This film screening and conversation preceded the keynote that opened “France and the Black Atlantic: Geographies of Slavery and Memory,” a workshop that sought to engage with the burgeoning scholarship on French and Francophone ideas and ideologies of race, Blackness (“négritude” in French), and the economic foundations of the transatlantic slave trade, in the context of inter-imperial rivalries and colonization schemes from Africa to the Americas. By inviting leading scholars from France and the United States and throughout the Francophone world to engage with these questions through a day-long symposium in Providence, the workshop highlighted the work of historians, literary scholars, anthropologists and sociologists who have been at the vanguard of these new histories and whose scholarship has advanced our understanding of newly articulated geographies of enslavement.


    This workshop was supported by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States and partially funded by the Pierre and Mary Ann Sorel Fund for French Studies, the Mollie B. Mandeville Lectureship Fund, and the Herbert H. Goldberg Lectureship Fund. It was cosponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. The keynote was also cosponsored by the Department of History, and the Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.

    Convened by Neil Safier, director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and associate professor of history.

    Full workshop schedule
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    This world is on a razor’s edge. Glaciers are melting, seas are warming, and species are disappearing at unprecedented rates. Authoritarianism, racism, book-banning regimes, anti-abortion legislation, and political closures of all kinds are on the rise. Mass violence is taking place in numerous contexts across the globe.

    And yet there are new openings, too. This world is also a place where popular movements, novel initiatives, and advances in science make it possible for us to imagine a carbon neutral future. The global uprisings of 2019, the Black Lives Matter movement, and countless demonstrations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia confirm that social change, though its pursuit may be arduous, is possible.

    What really is this world “we” are called to heal? Who is the “us” whose futures are radically entangled in it? The 2024 edition of the Political Concepts conference brought together a cohort of scholars to reflect on concepts that may be revised, deconstructed, or invented to face this world’s critical challenges.

    Speakers

    • Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman (Brown University)
    • Markus Berger (Rhode Island School of Design)
    • Michael Berman (Brown University)
    • Paula Gaetano-Adi (Rhode Island School of Design)
    • Macarena Gomez-Barris (Brown University)
    • Stathis Gourgouris (Columbia University)
    • Sharon Krause (Brown University)
    • Dilip Menon (University of Witwatersrand)
    • Mohamed Amer Meziane (Brown University)
    • Rebecca Nedostup (Brown University)
    • Thangam Ravindranathan (Brown University)
    • Christopher Roberts (Rhode Island School of Design)
    • Ada Smailbegović (Brown University)
    • Jason Stanley (Yale University)
    • Alexander Weheliye (Brown University)
    • Gary Wilder (City University of New York, Graduate Center)

    The event was presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and convened by Timothy Bewes, Ainsley LeSure, Brian Meeks, Adi Ophir, and Vazira Zamindar.

    Conference Schedule & Speaker Bios
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    This world is on a razor’s edge. Glaciers are melting, seas are warming, and species are disappearing at unprecedented rates. Authoritarianism, racism, book-banning regimes, anti-abortion legislation, and political closures of all kinds are on the rise. Mass violence is taking place in numerous contexts across the globe.

    And yet there are new openings, too. This world is also a place where popular movements, novel initiatives, and advances in science make it possible for us to imagine a carbon neutral future. The global uprisings of 2019, the Black Lives Matter movement, and countless demonstrations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia confirm that social change, though its pursuit may be arduous, is possible.

    What really is this world “we” are called to heal? Who is the “us” whose futures are radically entangled in it? The 2024 edition of the Political Concepts conference brought together a cohort of scholars to reflect on concepts that may be revised, deconstructed, or invented to face this world’s critical challenges.

    Speakers

    • Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman (Brown University)
    • Markus Berger (Rhode Island School of Design)
    • Michael Berman (Brown University)
    • Paula Gaetano-Adi (Rhode Island School of Design)
    • Macarena Gomez-Barris (Brown University)
    • Stathis Gourgouris (Columbia University)
    • Sharon Krause (Brown University)
    • Dilip Menon (University of Witwatersrand)
    • Mohamed Amer Meziane (Brown University)
    • Rebecca Nedostup (Brown University)
    • Thangam Ravindranathan (Brown University)
    • Christopher Roberts (Rhode Island School of Design)
    • Ada Smailbegović (Brown University)
    • Jason Stanley (Yale University)
    • Alexander Weheliye (Brown University)
    • Gary Wilder (City University of New York, Graduate Center)

    The event was presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and convened by Timothy Bewes, Ainsley LeSure, Brian Meeks, Adi Ophir, and Vazira Zamindar.

    Conference Schedule & Speaker Bios
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    Images today, digitized and disseminated online, are essentially mobile and transitory. They exist in order to be shared and sent. It is often thought that this circulatory nature of images is a recent phenomenon. But already a century ago, German art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg, in the introduction to his Mnemosyne Atlas , coined the term “image vehicles” and suggested that the “migrations of images” are woven into the very existence of images themselves.

    The notion of image vehicles calls for a dialogue between, on the one hand, art history, iconology, or image theory and, on the other, infrastructure studies. There would be no image vehicles without what allows for their mobility: wires, cables, satellites, shipping routes, and other components of transportation.

    This symposium addressed the significance of image vehicles and the infrastructures that make them possible, as well as the ways in which we can visualize these infrastructures in the form of images that can themselves be disseminated.


    The event was convened by Peter Szendy as part of the Cogut Institute’s Economies of Aesthetics initiative and in partnership with the Department of French and Francophone Studies.

    Image: “Cargo Cult” (from “Body Beautiful, Or Beauty Knows No Pain”) by Martha Rosler, c. 1966-1972, Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College

    See symposium website for video recordings
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    If we know anything about the relation between literature and politics, it is that what takes place or is spoken within a literary work cannot guarantee its political effects. What we call “content” may have little or nothing to do with the work’s political significance. “The more the opinions of the author remain hidden,” said revolutionary socialist thinker Friedrich Engels, “the better for the work of art.”

    “Political Concepts: The Literature Edition” featured scholars from a variety of fields exploring concepts drawn from the realm of literature that may be revised, deconstructed, or created anew to shed light on our contemporary political climate.

    The event, hosted by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, was organized by Tim Bewes, Sharon Krause, and Adi Ophir.

    See conference website for video recordings
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    If we know anything about the relation between literature and politics, it is that what takes place or is spoken within a literary work cannot guarantee its political effects. What we call “content” may have little or nothing to do with the work’s political significance. “The more the opinions of the author remain hidden,” said revolutionary socialist thinker Friedrich Engels, “the better for the work of art.”

    “Political Concepts: The Literature Edition” featured scholars from a variety of fields exploring concepts drawn from the realm of literature that may be revised, deconstructed, or created anew to shed light on our contemporary political climate.

    The event, hosted by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, was organized by Tim Bewes, Sharon Krause, and Adi Ophir.

    See conference website for video recordings
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    This two-day symposium brings together an international cohort of scholars to discuss the challenges of writing global histories today, including the epistemological difficulties of analogic and comparative thinking and the political implications of such histories for the present and future of global societies. What are the stakes of writing global histories today? Who should write global histories? And how?

    The symposium is incited by two recent, ground-breaking publications: David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Macmillan, 2021) and Alain Schnapp’s Ruines: Une histoire universelle des ruines. Des origines aux Lumières (Éditions du Seuil, 2020). Scholars at the symposium will use these texts as a point of departure for reflecting on writing global histories, and each day will end with a conversation with the authors.

    Free and open to the public. No registration is required. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.

    Convened by Yannis Hamilakis and Felipe Rojas with the support of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and the Humanities Initiative Programming Fund, the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, the Program in Early Cultures, the C.V. Starr Foundation Lectureships Fund, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative, and the Center for Middle East Studies.

    Schedule

    September 16: Rewriting the Past, Imagining Alternative Futures

    See day one schedule.

    September 17: The Past in Things: Ruins, Rubble, Remnants, Resistance

    9:00 am – 9:15 am

    Introduction | Felipe Rojas

     

    I. Ruins Without Ruins

    9:15 am – 10:15 am

    Moderator: Parker VanValkenburgh

    Eduardo Góes Neves, Universidade de São Paulo • “When the Ruins Are in the Trees: Tropical Forests as Historical Evidence”

    Robert Weiner, University of Colorado • “Naayéé’, Kukveni, and Roads Through Time: A Millenia (or More) of ‘Ruins’ in the U.S. Southwest”

    10:15 am – 10:30 am

    Coffee break

    10:30 am – 11:00 am

    Discussion

     

    II. Ruins Without People

    11:00 am – 12:30 pm

    Moderator: Neil Safier

    Sarah Newman, University of Chicago • “Animal Architecture, Animal Ruins, Animal Archaeology?”

    Lukas Rieppel, Brown University  “The Politics of Prehistory and Deep Time Horizon of Extractive Capitalism (Or How the Earth Sciences Ruined Prehistory)”

    Adrian Currie, University of Exeter  “The Present as Record, the Present as Ruin: Design and Idealization in Historical Science”

    12:30 pm – 1:00 pm

    Discussion

    1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

    Lunch break

     

    III. Making Ruins

    2:00 pm – 3:00 pm

    Moderator: Peter Van Dommelen

    Amanda Gaggioli, Brown University • “Historical Earthquakes and the Archaeological Expectations of Ruins”

    Alicia Jiménez, Duke University • “Unruining Black Burial Grounds in the North American South: Geer Cemetery (Durham, NC)” — Co-authored by Adam Rosenblatt, Duke University

    3:00 pm – 3:15 pm

    Coffee break

    3:15 pm – 3:45 pm

    Discussion

    3:45 pm – 4:15 pm

    Cristóbal Gnecco, Universidad del Cauca  “Dialectical Images and the Making of Ruins”

     

    General Discussion

    4:15 pm – 5:30 pm

    Conversation | Alain Schnapp

    Moderators: Yannis Hamilakis and Felipe Rojas

    Full schedule and more
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    This two-day symposium brings together an international cohort of scholars to discuss the challenges of writing global histories today, including the epistemological difficulties of analogic and comparative thinking and the political implications of such histories for the present and future of global societies. What are the stakes of writing global histories today? Who should write global histories? And how?

    The symposium is incited by two recent, ground-breaking publications: David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Macmillan, 2021) and Alain Schnapp’s Ruines: Une histoire universelle des ruines. Des origines aux Lumières (Éditions du Seuil, 2020). Scholars at the symposium will use these texts as a point of departure for reflecting on writing global histories, and each day will end with a conversation with the authors.

    Free and open to the public. No registration is required. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.

    Convened by Yannis Hamilakis and Felipe Rojas with the support of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and the Humanities Initiative Programming Fund, the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, the Program in Early Cultures, the C.V. Starr Foundation Lectureships Fund, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative, and the Center for Middle East Studies.

    Schedule

    September 16: Rewriting the Past, Imagining Alternative Futures

    9:00 am – 9:15 am

    Introduction | Yannis Hamilakis

     

    I. (Re)Writing Global Histories Today

    9:15 am – 10:15 am

    Moderator: Yannis Hamilakis

    Bathsheba Demuth, Brown University • “Of Ecologies and Possibilities: The Dawn of Everything as Seen from the Yukon River”

    Felipe Rojas, Brown University • Dawns Before Dawn: Ancient Local Histories of Remote Human Origins

    10:15 am – 10:30 am

    Coffee break

    10:30 am – 11:00 am

    Discussion

     

    II. The Dawn of Everything and the Evidence from the Americas

    11:00 am – 12:30 pm

    Moderator: Eduardo Góes Neves

    Susan Alt, Indiana University, Bloomington • “Invisible Landscapes: An Attempt to Avoid Euro-fantasies and Add Indigenous Theory to the Cahokia Story”

    David Carballo, Boston University • “Global History and Alternative Systems of Governance: A View from Mesoamerica”

    Mariana Cabral, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais • “Archaeology and the Imagination of Indigenous Histories in the Amazon: In Which We Contrast Archaeological and Indigenous Narratives of the Past, and Begin to Reconceive the Archaeological Discipline”

    12:30 pm – 1:00 pm

    Discussion

    1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

    Lunch break

     

    III. The Dawn of Everything Through a Decolonial and Indigenous Lens

    2:00 pm – 3:00 pm

    Moderator: Cristóbal Gnecco

    Zoe Todd, Carleton University • “The Dawn of Everything and Ancient Oceanic Fossil Kin: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Call to Refractive Integrity in Environmental Policy and Decolonization in So-called Alberta Today”

    Paulette Steeves, Algoma University • “Reclaiming and Rewriting Deep Indigenous Histories”

    3:00 pm – 3:15 pm

    Coffee break

    3:15 pm – 3:45 pm

    Discussion

    3:45 pm – 4:15 pm

    Yannis Hamilakis, Brown University • “Things Otherwise: Multi-temporality, Deep Histories, and the Politics of Decolonization”

     

    General Discussion

    4:15 pm – 5:30 pm

    Conversation | David Wengrow, University College London

    Moderators: Yannis Hamilakis and Felipe Rojas

    September 17: The Past in Things: Ruins, Rubble, Remnants, Resistance

    See day two schedule.

    Full schedule and more
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    May 13 May 14, 2022

    The Collaborative Public Workshop features 14 graduate students presenting papers developed over the course of the semester in the capstone seminar of the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities:

    Mariam Abou-Kathir (Religious Studies)
    Osama Ahmad (History)
    Alberto Alcaraz (Political Science)
    Inga Chinilina (Music)
    Tara Dhaliwal (Religious Studies)
    Julie Dind (Theater Arts and Performance Studies)
    Isabel Farías (Comparative Literature)
    Norman L. Frazier (History)
    Lee Gilboa (Music)
    Nabila Islam (Sociology)
    Mariz Kelada (Anthropology)
    Heather Lawrence (Modern Culture and Media)
    Sherena Razek (Modern Culture and Media)
    Stephen Woo (Modern Culture and Media)

    Each panel will include commentaries from guests Webb Keane (Anthropology, University of Michigan), Mara Mills (Media, Culture and Communication, New York University), Kevin Quashie (English, Brown University), and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (Comparative Literature and Italian Studies, Brown University), as well as a Q&A period.

    Schedule

    Friday, May 13, 2022 — Click here to see schedule.
    Saturday, May 14, 2022
    9:30 am – 10:00 am

    Coffee

    10:00 am – 11:30 am

    Panel 5

    • Inga Chinilina, Music • “Teleology and Time in Music in North America in the 20th Century”
      Commentaries: Mara Mills, Kevin Quashie
    • Nabila Islam, Sociology • “In Search of Sociology’s Lost Times: The Possibilities for Decolonizing Time in Postcolonial Sociology”
      Commentaries: Webb Keane, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
    12:30 pm – 2:00 pm

    Panel 6

    • Mariz Kelada, Anthropology • “Media’s Extramoral Politics: Infrastructures of Filming in Cairo’s Streets”
      Commentaries: Webb Keane, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
    • Osama Ahmad, History • “Tarīkh Magazine, 1999–2019: (Re)Producing knowledge in Lahore’s Urdu Bazaar”
      Commentaries: Webb Keane, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
    2:00 pm – 2:15 pm

    Coffee

    2:15 pm – 3:45 pm

    Panel 7

    • Julie Dind, Theater Arts and Performance Studies • “Voodling, Camérer: Image Is a(n Autistic) Verb”
      Commentaries: Mara Mills, Kevin Quashie
    • Isabel Farías Velasco, Comparative Literature • “Trilingual Hijacking: The Initial Encounter Between Latin, Nahuatl, and Spanish in Early Modern Mexico”
      Commentaries: Webb Keane, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg

    See the event website for abstracts of the talks.

    Free and open to the public. No registration is required. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6120.

    Brown University abides by public health guidance and health and safety protocols to reduce the risk of transmission of COVID-19. Event attendees, including visitors and guests, must comply with all University policies and protocols in place at the time of the event, including current University policy regarding face masks and coverings (see the University’s COVID-19 Campus Activity Status page for the current policy for both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals).

    About the Seminar

    During the spring of 2022, the Project Development Workshop (HMAN 2500) was led by Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English and Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of History. Students developed and workshopped a paper over the course of the semester while performing a number of collateral academic roles: they nominated and introduced a text to the seminar that was formative for their scholarly development; they served as first questioners for papers workshopped by others; and they interviewed one of their peers and prepared an introduction to their work. By providing training and preparation for roles that are crucial to the practice and fabric of academic life, yet are seldom the object of formal study and reflection, the course reimagines the conditions and extends the limits of an interdisciplinary and collaborative research space.

    About the Doctoral Certificate

    The Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities promotes crossdisciplinary work oriented toward the most challenging questions facing humanities research today. Collaboration is built through research practices dedicated to thinking together across disciplines and geographical locations. Participants pursue these forms of inquiry through teaching models and student practices that experiment with group presentations, collaborative online discussions, co-authored seminar papers, and other forms of intellectual partnership.

    Full schedule, abstracts, and bios
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    May 13 May 14, 2022

    The Collaborative Public Workshop features 14 graduate students presenting papers developed over the course of the semester in the capstone seminar of the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities:

    Mariam Abou-Kathir (Religious Studies)
    Osama Ahmad (History)
    Alberto Alcaraz (Political Science)
    Inga Chinilina (Music)
    Tara Dhaliwal (Religious Studies)
    Julie Dind (Theater Arts and Performance Studies)
    Isabel Farías (Comparative Literature)
    Norman L. Frazier (History)
    Lee Gilboa (Music)
    Nabila Islam (Sociology)
    Mariz Kelada (Anthropology)
    Heather Lawrence (Modern Culture and Media)
    Sherena Razek (Modern Culture and Media)
    Stephen Woo (Modern Culture and Media)

    Each panel will include commentaries from guests Webb Keane (Anthropology, University of Michigan), Mara Mills (Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University), Kevin Quashie (English, Brown University), and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (Comparative Literature and Italian Studies, Brown University), as well as a Q&A period.

    Schedule

    Friday, May 13, 2022
    8:30 am – 9:00 am

    Coffee

    9:00 am – 10:30 am

    Introduction and Panel 1

    • Heather Lawrence, Modern Culture and Media • “Memes on Trial: From Permit Patty to Karen”
      Commentaries: Mara Mills, Kevin Quashie
    • Alberto Alcaraz Escarcega, Political Science • “Notes on Arendt’s Sensorium: Appearance, Metaphor, and Common Sense”
      Commentaries: Mara Mills, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
    10:30 am – 10:45 am

    Break

    10:45 am – 12:15 pm

    Panel 2

    • Lee Gilboa, Music • “Against the Odds: Listening for Vocality and Heardness in Oral Testimonies
      Commentaries: Mara Mills, Kevin Quashie
    • Stephen Woo, Modern Culture and Media • “Framing Carceral and Cinematic Time
      Commentaries: Mara Mills, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
    1:35 pm – 3:00 pm

    Panel 3

    • Tara Dhaliwal, Religious Studies • “Dulla Bhatti: Son of the Daughters of Punjab”
      Commentaries: Webb Keane, Kevin Quashie
    • Norman L. Frazier, History • “The Home of Heinrich Zille: Tenements in Working-Class Berlin, 1853–1926”
      Commentaries: Webb Keane, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
    3:00 pm – 3:30 pm

    Coffee

    3:30 pm – 5:00 pm

    Panel 4

    • Sherena Razek, Modern Culture and Media • “On Seeds and Soil: Palestinian Visual Cultures of the Subterranean”
      Commentaries: Mara Mills, Kevin Quashie
    • Mariam Abou-Kathir, Religious Studies • “‘An Ocean Without a Shore’: Wajd and Wujud in ‘A’isha al-Ba‘uniyyah’s Principles of Sufism
      Commentaries: Webb Keane, Kevin Quashie
    5:00 pm

    Reception

    Saturday, May 14, 2022 — Click here to see schedule.

    See the event website for abstracts of the talks.

    Free and open to the public. No registration is required. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6120.

    Brown University abides by public health guidance and health and safety protocols to reduce the risk of transmission of COVID-19. Event attendees, including visitors and guests, must comply with all University policies and protocols in place at the time of the event, including current University policy regarding face masks and coverings (see the University’s COVID-19 Campus Activity Status page for the current policy for both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals).

    About the Seminar

    During the spring of 2022, the Project Development Workshop (HMAN 2500) was led by Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English and Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of History. Students developed and workshopped a paper over the course of the semester while performing a number of collateral academic roles: they nominated and introduced a text to the seminar that was formative for their scholarly development; they served as first questioners for papers workshopped by others; and they interviewed one of their peers and prepared an introduction to their work. By providing training and preparation for roles that are crucial to the practice and fabric of academic life, yet are seldom the object of formal study and reflection, the course reimagines the conditions and extends the limits of an interdisciplinary and collaborative research space.

    About the Doctoral Certificate

    The Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities promotes crossdisciplinary work oriented toward the most challenging questions facing humanities research today. Collaboration is built through research practices dedicated to thinking together across disciplines and geographical locations. Participants pursue these forms of inquiry through teaching models and student practices that experiment with group presentations, collaborative online discussions, co-authored seminar papers, and other forms of intellectual partnership.

    Full schedule, abstracts, and bios
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    May 6 May 7, 2022

    “Capitalism and the Human” begins from two closely related premises: 1) that the category of the human is today inseparable from the dynamics of contemporary capitalism and 2) that 21st-century activism cannot evade a critical encounter with the question of the human in its various guises. Topics will include the persistent allure of concepts such as agency, autonomy, and thought; the philosophical implications of ever more invasive technologies of surveillance and governance; the apparent indispensability of the category of the human in demands for racial justice; and the uncertain prospects of species survival. What future remains for one of the most influential traditions of 20th-century radical thought, the philosophical critique of the human?

    The conference, presented as part of the Collaborative Humanities Initiative, was co-organized by Timothy Bewes, Professor of English at Brown University, and Jeremy Gilbert, Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London, who was a visiting professor at the Cogut Institute in spring 2020.

    Sessions

    Session 1: Anthropocene and Futurity

    Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University • “‘Anthropos’ Trumps ‘Homo Economicus’” (video)
    Ashley Dawson, CUNY Graduate Center • “The Human Prospect in an Age of Biocapitalism” (video)

    Moderator: Marah Nagelhout

    Session 2: Bio-Necro-Sociality

    Sophie Lewis, Brooklyn Institute for Social Research • “Antiwork Anthrogenesis” (video)
    Dierdra Reber, University of Kentucky • “Losing Our Minds to Post-Truth: On White Capital, Necroprofit, and Human Futurity” (video)

    Moderator: Connie Scozzaro

    Session 3: Racial Capitalism

    Kathryn Yusoff, Queen Mary University of London • “Decapitalizing the Human in the Epoch of the Inhumanities” (video)
    Richard E. Purcell, Carnegie Mellon University • “Rereading Long ’70s Black Radicalism Against Our Techocapitalist Present” (video)

    Moderator: Rolland Murray

    YouTube playlist and abstracts
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    What it means to pursue a Ph.D. in the humanities has changed significantly in recent decades as a result of transformations in the disciplines and conditions affecting the careers and lives of doctoral students. Bringing these two aspects of the current situation in relation to one another, this symposium aims to further existing discussions of the challenges and opportunities of graduate education in the humanities.

    The symposium featured humanities educators and doctoral students exploring questions relating to the values and objectives of doctoral programs; the ways attention to historically marginalized people and topics has transformed disciplines; the function of common courses or canons; the role of interdisciplinary programs, internships, and community engagement; and the shapes that doctoral scholarship should be allowed or encouraged to take.

    The symposium was convened by Cogut Institute Director Amanda Anderson and Graduate School Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Thomas A. Lewis.

    Sessions

    Session 1

    Clifford Ando, University of Chicago • “Classics, the Classical Canon, and the 21st-Century Ph.D.” (video)
    George Sánchez, University of Southern California • “Pushing a ‘Wider Public’ into Training for Public History” (video)

    Moderator: Tamara Chin

    Session 2

    Ralina Joseph, University of Washington • “Radical Listening to Re-Envision the Ph.D.” (video)
    Kathryn Lofton, Yale University • “What We Have Here Is a Relationship Problem: On the Challenge of Reforming the Humanities” (video unavailable)

    Moderator: Zachary Sng

    Session 3

    Jean Allman, Washington University in St. Louis • “Communities and Cohorts: Re-Designing the Humanities Ph.D. Through the Studiolab” (video)
    Christopher Newfield, Independent Social Research Foundation • “The Coming Revival of Humanities Graduate Programs” (video)

    Moderator: Amanda Anderson

    Session 4

    21st-Century Ph.D. Mellon Proctors:
    Eleanor Rowe-Stefanik and Emily Simon, English (video)
    zuri arman and Melaine Ferdinand-King, Africana Studies (video)

    Moderator: Rebecca Nedostup

    Session 5

    Concluding Roundtable: Jean Allman, Clifford Ando, Ralina Joseph, Kathryn Lofton, Christopher Newfield, and George Sánchez (video)

    Moderator: Thomas A. Lewis

    YouTube playlist and abstracts
  • The Political Concepts Initiative operates under the assumption that our era needs a revised political lexicon to help us better understand the world in which we live and act, and that the humanities can and should contribute to such a revision. This is all the more urgent today, given the dramatic and traumatic events of the past two years and their repercussions for all aspects of our lives, from the intimacy of our homes to our shared workplaces, countries, and planet.

    The 2022 conference featured Brown and RISD scholars from a variety of fields working to revise, deconstruct, or create concepts in the effort to uncover or recover their political import. These concepts responded to recent historical experience and were meant to meet the challenges of an ominously uncertain future. What can this period teach us about our society and institutions, “us,” “them,” the planet, the historical present we share, and the future of this sharing?

    The event, hosted by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, was organized by Tim Bewes, Sharon Krause, and Adi Ophir.

    Sessions

    Session 4

    Juliet Hooker, Political Science • “Loss” (video)
    Yannis Hamilakis, Archaeology and the Ancient World • “Remains” (video)

    Moderator: Rolland Murray, English

    Session 5

    Masako Fidler, Slavic Studies • “Impoverished morphemes” (video)
    Thomas Schestag, German Studies • “Term” (video)

    Moderator: Peter Szendy, Comparative Literature

    Session 6

    Holly Case, History • “Struggle” (video unavailable)
    Leon Hilton, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies • “Destituence” (video)

    Moderator: Tim Bewes, English

    YouTube playlist and abstracts
  • The Political Concepts Initiative operates under the assumption that our era needs a revised political lexicon to help us better understand the world in which we live and act, and that the humanities can and should contribute to such a revision. This is all the more urgent today, given the dramatic and traumatic events of the past two years and their repercussions for all aspects of our lives, from the intimacy of our homes to our shared workplaces, countries, and planet.

    The 2022 conference featured Brown and RISD scholars from a variety of fields working to revise, deconstruct, or create concepts in the effort to uncover or recover their political import. These concepts responded to recent historical experience and were meant to meet the challenges of an ominously uncertain future. What can this period teach us about our society and institutions, “us,” “them,” the planet, the historical present we share, and the future of this sharing?

    The event, hosted by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, was organized by Tim Bewes, Sharon Krause, and Adi Ophir.

    Sessions

    Session 1

    Zachary Sng, German Studies • “Counting” (video)
    David Frank, Philosophy • “Cooperation” (video)

    Moderator: Amanda Anderson, Cogut Institute

    Session 2

    Lynne Joyrich, Modern Culture and Media • “Unthinkable” (video)
    Vazira Zamindar, History • “Civilian” (video)

    Moderator: Sharon Krause, Political Science

    Session 3

    Jinying Li, Modern Culture and Media • “Wall” (video)
    Avishek Ganguly, Literary Arts and Studies, RISD • “Repair” (video)

    Moderator: Adi Ophir, Cogut Institute

    YouTube playlist and abstracts
  • Friday, April 9, 2021, 10:00 am – 3:30 pm
    Saturday, April 10, 2021, 10:00 am – 2:30 pm

    The Collaborative Public Workshop concluded the capstone seminar of the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities, taught in Spring 2021 by Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English, and Tamara Chin, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies.

    Speakers included Pablo a Marca (Italian Studies) on posthumanist fairy tales, Katherine Contess (Modern Culture and Media) on the gadgetized body, Thomas Dai (American Studies) on entomological aesthetics, Kareem Estefan (Modern Culture and Media) on Palestinian fabulations, Nomaan Hasan (Anthropology) on Sufi ritual life, Andressa Maia (Portuguese and Brazilian Studies) on Black female protagonism in Brazil, Alessandro Moghrabi (Comparative Literature) on ironic materiality, Regina Pieck (Hispanic Studies) on Mexico City’s subterranean poetics, Jake Sokolov-Gonzalez (Music) on vibrational ontology, Katyayni Seth (Anthropology) on ethnography in practice, and Baoli Yang (Comparative Literature) on medieval Asian Sinoscript culture.

    The panels included commentaries from guests Veena Das (Johns Hopkins University) and Macarena Gómez-Barris (Pratt Institute) and from Brown University faculty members Faiz Ahmed (History) and Marc Redfield (Comparative Literature, English, and German Studies), as well as a Q&A period.

    This event, presented as part of the Collaborative Humanities Initiative, was free and open to the public.

    View the full schedule
  • Friday, April 9, 2021, 10:00 am – 3:30 pm
    Saturday, April 10, 2021, 10:00 am – 2:30 pm

    The Collaborative Public Workshop concluded the capstone seminar of the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities, taught in Spring 2021 by Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English, and Tamara Chin, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies.

    Speakers included Pablo a Marca (Italian Studies) on posthumanist fairy tales, Katherine Contess (Modern Culture and Media) on the gadgetized body, Thomas Dai (American Studies) on entomological aesthetics, Kareem Estefan (Modern Culture and Media) on Palestinian fabulations, Nomaan Hasan (Anthropology) on Sufi ritual life, Andressa Maia (Portuguese and Brazilian Studies) on Black female protagonism in Brazil, Alessandro Moghrabi (Comparative Literature) on ironic materiality, Regina Pieck (Hispanic Studies) on Mexico City’s subterranean poetics, Jake Sokolov-Gonzalez (Music) on vibrational ontology, Katyayni Seth (Anthropology) on ethnography in practice, and Baoli Yang (Comparative Literature) on medieval Asian Sinoscript culture.

    The panels included commentaries from guests Veena Das (Johns Hopkins University) and Macarena Gómez-Barris (Pratt Institute) and from Brown University faculty members Faiz Ahmed (History) and Marc Redfield (Comparative Literature, English, and German Studies), as well as a Q&A period.

    This event, presented as part of the Collaborative Humanities Initiative, was free and open to the public.

    View the full schedule
  • Virtual event on May 8 and 9, 2020

    The 2020 Collaborative Public Workshop featured twelve interventions on a variety of topics including, among others, African American and Black history, deforestation and the environment, settler colonialism, the history and theory of political emancipation, ethical and political claims of aesthetic practices, and experiences of life under duress. The speakers are graduate students in Africana Studies, American Studies, Anthropology, German Studies, Music and Multimedia Composition, Political Science, Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, and Religious Studies. Each panel included commentaries from guests Stephen Best (University of California, Berkeley) and Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London) and from Brown University faculty members Andre Willis (Religious Studies) and Patricia Ybarra (Theatre Arts and Performance Studies), as well as a Q&A period.

    Schedule, speaker bios, and presentation abstracts.

    The Collaborative Public Workshop concluded the capstone seminar of the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities. Participants developed and workshopped a paper over the course of the semester while studying a number of collateral academic roles: they nominated and introduced a text to the seminar that was formative for their scholarly development; they served as first questioners for papers workshopped by others; and they interviewed one of their peers and prepared an introduction to his or her work. By providing training and preparation for roles that are crucial to the practice and fabric of academic life, yet are seldom the object of formal study and reflection, the course reimagined the conditions and extended the limits of an interdisciplinary and collaborative research space.

    This virtual event was co-organized and moderated by Timothy Bewes, Professor of English and Interim Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and Brian Meeks, Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Brown University.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    The 2019 conference of the Political Concepts Initiative, subtitled “Retouch,” was co-organized by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (Brown University), Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman (Brown University), Leela Gandhi (Brown University), and Vazira Zamindar (Brown University).

    The conference addressed questions related to structures of imperialism, racial capitalism, and gender violence catalyzed by movements such as Black Lives Matter, the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protests, food sovereignty, and #MeToo. Speakers engaged with concepts through which these crimes and the indispensability of reparations can be described, explained, and analyzed. The conference explored modalities and initiatives of redress, redistribution, and resurgence through which, once these crimes are acknowledged, different worlds can be reimagined and retouched.

    Session 5

    Moderator: Itohan Osayimwese, Brown University
    Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Brown University • Regard (video)
    Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning • Resurgence (video)

    Session 6

    Moderator: Vazira Zamindar, Brown University
    Imani Perry, Princeton University • Mother (video)
    Thangam Ravindranathan, Brown University • Elephant (video)

    Session 7

    Moderator: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Brown University
    Ainsley LeSure, Brown University • Equality (video)
    Patricia Ybarra, Brown University • Debt (video)

    Co-sponsored by the Charles K. Colver Lectureships and Publications, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Humanities Initiative Programming Fund, Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies, Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Departments of Africana Studies, American Studies, Anthropology, Comparative Literature, English, History, History of Art and Architecture, Literary Arts, and Modern Culture and Media.

    YouTube playlist
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    The 2019 conference of the Political Concepts Initiative, subtitled “Retouch,” was co-organized by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (Brown University), Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman (Brown University), Leela Gandhi (Brown University), and Vazira Zamindar (Brown University).

    The conference addressed questions related to structures of imperialism, racial capitalism, and gender violence catalyzed by movements such as Black Lives Matter, the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protests, food sovereignty, and #MeToo. Speakers engaged with concepts through which these crimes and the indispensability of reparations can be described, explained, and analyzed. The conference explored modalities and initiatives of redress, redistribution, and resurgence through which, once these crimes are acknowledged, different worlds can be reimagined and retouched.

    Session 1

    Moderator: Patsy Lewis, Brown University
    Jasmine Johnston, University of Pennsylvania  Choreography (video)
    Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Brown University • Occupation (video)

    Session 2

    Moderator: Paula Gaetano-Adi, Rhode Island School of Design
    Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo, Brown University • Indolence (video)
    Poulomi Saha, University of California, Berkeley • Contingency (video)

    Session 3

    Moderator: Leora Maltz-Leca, Rhode Island School of Design
    Emily Owens, Brown University • Violence (video)
    Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Brown University • Errata (video)

    Session 4

    Moderator: Naoko Shibusawa, Brown University
    Vazira Zamindar, Brown University • Waiting (video)
    Tina Campt, Brown University • Adjacency (video)

    Co-sponsored by the Charles K. Colver Lectureships and Publications, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Humanities Initiative Programming Fund, Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies, Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Departments of Africana Studies, American Studies, Anthropology, Comparative Literature, English, History, History of Art and Architecture, Literary Arts, and Modern Culture and Media.

    YouTube playlist
  •  Location: Rochambeau HouseRoom: Music Room

    Theatre Without Borders/Théâtre sans frontières
    Translating, Circulating and Performing Early Modern Drama

    The conference explored the work of Corneille in the context of European theatre and the circulation of early modern drama through both translation and performance, from the 17th to the 20th century.

    Friday, September 27, 2019
    Conveners: Karen Newman, Owen F. Walker ’33 Professor of Humanities, and Lewis Seifert, Professor of French Studies
    9:00 AM – 9:30 AM Coffee and Pastries
    9:30 AM – 9:45 AM Welcome
    9:45 AM – 10:45 AM Jennifer Row (University of Minnesota) • Corneille’s Queer Temporalities
    10:45AM – 11:45 AM Christian Biet (Université Paris Nanterre) • La Place Royale, ou l’urbanisme moderne : les lieux de la nouvelle comédie
    11:45 AM – 12:00 PM Break
    12:00 PM – 1:00 PM Katherine Ibbett (Trinity College, Oxford) • Andromaque in Translation: Foreignness and Refuge
    1:00 PM – 2:30 PM Lunch
    2:30 PM – 3:30 PM François Lecercle (Université de Paris-Sorbonne) • Corneille’s Comedies and the Rise of Theatrophobia
    3:30 PM – 4:00 PM Coffee Break
    4:00 PM – 5:00 PM Michael Moon (Emory University) • Corneille, Racine, Molière, and New York Queer Theater in the 1960s and After
    5:00 PM – 6:00 PM Reception

    This conference was presented by the French Center of Excellence and the Department of Comparative Literature with the support of the French Embassy’s Cultural Services, and was co-sponsored by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, the Department of French Studies, and the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    This conference took up the intersections between critical race theory, affect theory, and poetics as a way of exploring how the formal innovation and experimentation engaged in by poets of color is connected in complex and myriad ways to the contexts that shape their production and reception — contexts in which structures of race play a significant role. It does so by addressing the soft boundaries that connect aesthetic expressions of racialized affect found in works by poets such as Berssenbrugge and Rankine and the various theoretical frameworks of affect theory associated with thinkers like Ahmed, Deleuze, Fanon, and Tomkins. In so doing, Feeling Its Presence staged an engagement with the powerful argument that Dorothy Wang makes in her book Thinking Its Presence on behalf of a historically sensitive mode of critical formalism attuned to the relationship between poetic form and “the larger social, historical, and political contexts that produced the poet’s subjectivity.”

    The scholars presenting their work were graduate students enrolled in the collaborative humanities seminar “Theories of Affect: Poetics of Expression Through and Beyond Identity” (HMAN 2400K) taught by Daniel Kim and Ada Smailbegovic. The conference concluded, appropriately enough, with a lecture by Dorothy Wang, Professor of American Studies at Williams College and the author of Thinking its Presence: Form, Race and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2014).

    Schedule

    Thursday, May 9, 2019
    8:30 AM – 9:00 AM Morning Coffee
    9:00 AM – 9:15 AM Opening Remarks
    9:15 AM – 11:00 AM Panel 1: Migrant Orientations: Dislocation, Materiality, Transfiguration

    Thomas Dai • “Vagrant Acts: The Poetics of Jenny Xie and Kai Carlson-Wee”
    MJ Cunniff • “‘Scarlet itself is matter:’ Lyric Perceptibility in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge”
    Katey Preston • “‘Gold or Gold-Coloured:’ Transfiguration in Mercedes Eng’s Prison Industrial Complex Explodes

    11:00 AM – 11:15 AM Break
    11:15 AM – 1:00 PM Panel 2: Dictee

    Ashley Dun • “The Corpus of Exile in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Visual Texts”
    Kelsey-Yichi Ma • “Vulnerability and the Invulnerable Narrative: The Second Person in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee
    Erin Prior • “‘Stand as a run stands:’ Identity as Epistemology in Theresa Cha’s Dictee

    1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Lunch Break
    2:00 PM – 3:45 PM Panel 3: Affective Bodies

    Noah Brooksher • “Poetics, Ethics, Contingency: The Letter of the Future, or the Future as Letter”
    Mariam Abou-Kathir • “‘The Body’s Crime of Living:’ Epic Temporality and Generational Trauma in Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds
    Amber Vistein • “Stuck in the Throat: Theorizing Oral Expressivity in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric

     3:45 pm – 4:00 pm Break 
     4:00 pm – 5:30 pm Dorothy Wang • “English Poetry and the ‘Afterlife’ of Colonialism”
    5:30 pm – 6:30 pm Reception

    This event, presented as part of the Collaborative Humanities Initiative, was co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, the Departments of American Studies, Comparative Literature, English, and Modern Culture and Media, the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies, and the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    April 26, 2019

    The Collaborative Public Workshop concluded a capstone seminar for the Graduate Certificate in Collaborative Humanities. The seminar, HMAN 2500: Project Development Workshop, was taught in spring 2019 by Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English, and Tamara Chin, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies.

    Over the course of the semester, participants in the seminar developed and workshopped a paper central to their core doctoral work. In addition, all participants performed a number of diverse roles: they nominated and then introduced a text that was formative for their scholarly development; they served as first questioners for papers workshopped by others; and they interviewed one of their peers and prepared a formal introduction of their work. The course provided training for roles that are crucial to the form and quality of academic and public life but that are seldom an object of study and practice in themselves.

    The conference featured talks by anthropologist Rosalind Morris (Columbia University) and political scientist Corey Robin (Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center) as well as Brown University graduate students Chris DiBona (Religious Studies), Aaron Jacobs (History), Nechama Juni (Religious Studies), Irina Kalinka (Modern Culture and Media), Pedro Lopes de Almeida (Portuguese and Brazilian Studies), Stephen Marsh (English), Caleb Murray (Religious Studies), N’Kosi Oates (Africana Studies), Urszula Rutkowska (English) and Jan Tabor (German Studies).

    Brown University faculty Melvin Rogers, Associate Professor of Political Science, and Ellen Rooney, Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in English and Modern Culture and Media, served as respondents along with Rosalind Morris and Corey Robin.

    Read the full program

    This event was presented as part of the Collaborative Humanities Initiative.

     

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    April 5 and 6, 2019

    Narratives of Debt gathered key thinkers in contemporary critical theory to explore the question of debt in an interdisciplinary perspective, ranging from the history of slavery to psychoanalysis, from literature to financial capitalism, from philosophy to cryptocurrencies. The conference was committed to examining the various ways of narrating—witnessing—the condition of being indebted and the historical rise of indebtedness as a mode of governance (each narrative entailing decisions about justice, ethics, politics). Debt itself is also considered as a narrative, i.e., a performative fiction that organizes time by linking past, present, and future in a diegetic chain. Money, if we define it with Deleuze and Guattari as “the means for rendering the debt infinite,” constitutes the backdrop of this economic narratology.

    Co-organized by Peter Szendy (Brown University) and Emmanuel Bouju (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and Institut Universitaire de France), the conference featured scholars from a broad range of fields. Speakers included Arjun Appadurai (New York University), Jennifer Baker (New York University), Anthony Bogues (Brown University), Raphaëlle Guidée (Université de Poitiers), Bonnie Honig (Brown University), Odette Lienau (Cornell Law School), Annie McClanahan (University of California/Irvine), Florence Magnot-Ogilvy (Université de Rennes 2), Catherine Malabou (Kingston University, London and University of California/Irvine), Eric Santner (University of Chicago), and Joseph Vogl (Humboldt Universität).

    Full schedule with links to recorded talks is available on the website of the Cogut Institute.

    The conference, presented as part of the Economies of Aesthetics Initiative, was co-sponsored by the Institut Universitaire de France and the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Brown University’s Humanities Initiative Programming Fund, the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and the Departments of Anthropology, Comparative Literature, English, French Studies, German Studies, Modern Culture and Media, and Philosophy.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    The “Science Edition” was co-organized by Timothy Bewes, Leela Gandhi, Adi Ophir, and Lukas Rieppel and brought together scholars with a broad range of disciplinary trainings and affiliations. Speakers presented a single concept, one that needed to be revised, deconstructed, or invented in order to understand, criticize, and, if necessary resist recent changes in the organization of scientific knowledge and academic knowledge more broadly.

    The concepts are tools for a critical explication of the ways in which scientific knowledges have been impacted by, and integrated into, the neoliberal economy and global order, the forces that have eroded liberal democratic regimes and brought about the disintegration of the common, and the struggles for decolonization, democracy and social justice. Presentations questioned, first, the ways these processes, forces, and struggles work through the sciences and transform the inner fabric of scientific research and academic practice, and second, how science itself has been shaped as an arena of political struggle.

    Session 5

    Moderator: Timothy Bewes
    Etienne BensonEnvironment (video)
    Joanna RadinFuture (video)

    Session 6

    Moderator: Leela Gandhi
    Mara MillsImpairment (video)
    Iris MonteroScala Naturae (video)

    Session 7

    Moderator: Lukas Rieppel
    Banu SubramaniamDiaspora/e (video unavailable)
    Suman SethRace (video unavailable)

    Session 8

    Moderator: Jacques Lezra
    Yarden KatzEntrepreneurial Science (video)
    Peter Galison and Noah FeldmanCorporatized Knowledge (video)

    This conference was funded in part by the Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureship, the CV Starr Foundation Lectureship, the Humanities Initiative Programming Fund, and the Program in Science, Technologies, and Society.

    YouTube playlist
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    The “Science Edition” was co-organized by Timothy Bewes, Leela Gandhi, Adi Ophir, and Lukas Rieppel and brought together scholars with a broad range of disciplinary trainings and affiliations. Speakers presented a single concept, one that needed to be revised, deconstructed, or invented in order to understand, criticize, and, if necessary resist recent changes in the organization of scientific knowledge and academic knowledge more broadly.

    The concepts are tools for a critical explication of the ways in which scientific knowledges have been impacted by, and integrated into, the neoliberal economy and global order, the forces that have eroded liberal democratic regimes and brought about the disintegration of the common, and the struggles for decolonization, democracy and social justice. Presentations questioned, first, the ways these processes, forces, and struggles work through the sciences and transform the inner fabric of scientific research and academic practice, and second, how science itself has been shaped as an arena of political struggle.

    Session 1

    Moderator: Adi Ophir
    Stephanie DickDatabase (video)
    Dan HirschmanStylized Facts (video)

    Session 2

    Moderator: Sharon Krause
    Rebecca NedostupPractice/Praxis (video)
    Barbara Herrnstein SmithScientism (video)

    Session 3

    Moderator: Alka Menon
    Alex CsiszarPeer Review (video)
    Kaushik Sunder RajanValue (video)

    Session 4

    Moderator: Etienne Balibar
    Raphael SassowerScientific Progress (video)
    Tamara ChinHomo Geoeconomicus (video)

    The conference was funded in part by the Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureship, the CV Starr Foundation Lectureship, the Humanities Initiative Programming Fund, and the Program in Science, Technologies, and Society.

    YouTube playlist
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    October 26 and 27, 2018

    In South Asian art, the distinction between the “secular” and the “religious,” further complicated by the “spiritual,” has been fraught with contestations. In this symposium, art historians, historians, and philosophers examined the entanglement of art history’s categories and practices with the politics of the present. The symposium positioned itself at the cusp of two dominant discourses: (i) the lingering Orientalist and nationalist projections that emphasize the “religious” nature of South Asian artistic traditions as against Western secularization; (ii) the assertion of the place of art within the modern secular life of nations, which posits the transitions of objects from earlier religious to new artistic denominations.

    Speakers and Participants: Amanda Anderson, Brown University; Ariella Azoulay, Brown University; Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University; Iftikhar Dadi, Cornell University; Finbarr Barry Flood, New York University; Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and Cogut Institute; Kajri Jain, University of Toronto; Santhi Kavuri-Bauer, San Francisco State University; Sonal Khullar, University of Washington, Seattle; Jinah Kim, Harvard University; Leora Maltz-Leca, Rhode Island School of Design; Saloni Mathur, UCLA; Sumathi Ramaswamy, Duke University; Tamara Sears, Rutgers University; Kavita Singh, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; Foad Torshizi, Rhode Island School of Design; Laura Weinstein, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Karin Zitzewitz, Michigan State University.

    The symposium, which took place on October 26 and 27, 2018, was co-organized by Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar, the symposium was presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as part of its Collaborative Humanities Initiative and by the Center for Contemporary South Asia of the Watson Institute as part of Art History from the South.

    View Abstracts and Videos
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    In the context of current ecological crises, the environmental humanities has advanced a great number of vital and interrelated projects, both critical-diagnostic and aspirational-transformative. We aimed through this conference to promote a collective dialogue about this highly active field. 

    Full video playlist of this conference.

    Friday, April 6, 2018

    Welcome and Introduction [Video]
    Amanda Anderson, Brown University
    Claire Brault, Brown University
    Iris Montero, Brown University

    Beyond the Human I: Suffering and Respect [Video]
    Moderator: Tamara Chin, Brown University
    Sharon Krause, Brown University • Political Respect for Nature
    Branka Arsić, Columbia University • Marvelous Extinctions: Melville on Animal Suffering

    Beyond the Human II: Sense-Making and Justice [Video]
    Moderator: Jeffrey Moser, Brown University
    Mark Cladis, Brown University • Racial and Environmental Justice in the Wild
    Katherine Behar, Baruch College, City University of New York • What Makes Sense? Environmental Sensing and Nonhuman Sense

    Blue Ecologies I [Video]
    Moderator: Brian Lander, Brown University
    Macarena Gómez-Barris, Pratt Institute • Disappearing Archipelagos
    Astrida Neimanis, University of Sydney • 2067: The Sea and the Breathing

    Introduction: Leela Gandhi, Brown University
    Amitav Ghosh, Writer • Embattled Earth: Commodities, Conflict and Climate Change in the Indian Ocean Region
    Presented as part of the OP Jindal Distinguished Lecture Series of the Center for Contemporary South Asia

    Saturday, April 7, 2018

    Exploring Methods I [Video]
    Moderator: Iris Montero, Brown University
    Kyle Powys Whyte, Michigan State University • Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Settler Fantasies
    Vera Candiani, Princeton University • The Costs of Environmental History: A View from Latin America

    Blue Ecologies II [Video]
    Moderator: Claire Brault, Brown University
    Stacy Alaimo, University of Texas at Arlington • Composing Blue Ecologies: Science, Aesthetics, and the Creatures of the Abyss
    Bathsheba Demuth, Brown University • Whales, Whalers, and Thinking the Ocean through Cetacean Labor

    Exploring Methods II [Video]
    Moderator: J. Timmons Roberts, Brown University
    Dale Jamieson, New York University • Environmental Humanities: Problems and Prospects
    Gregory Cushman, University of Kansas • How to Make the Environmental Humanities Central to Teaching Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies from the Start: A Case Study

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    The 2017-18 conference was dedicated to analyzing and contesting the transformation of the American political system under the presidency of Donald Trump.

    Session 5

    Moderator: Rebecca Schneider, Brown University
    Wendy Chun, Brown University • Authenticity
    Sara Guindani, Collège d’études mondiales, Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme • Transparency

    Video

    Session 6

    Moderator: Timothy Bewes, Brown University
    John Cayley, Brown University • Reading
    Lynne Joyrich, Brown University • Television

    Video

    Session 7

    Moderator: Lingzhen Wang, Brown University
    Nick Mirzoeff, New York University • Love
    Jack Halberstam, Columbia University • Wildness

    Video

    Session 8

    Moderator: Susan Buck-Morss, The Graduate Center/City University of New York
    Claire Brault, Brown University • Uchronia
    Françoise Vergès, Collège d’études mondiales, Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme • Water

    Video

    YouTube playlist
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    The 2017–18 conference was dedicated to analyzing and contesting the transformation of the American political system under the presidency of Donald Trump.

    Session 1

    Moderator: Amanda Anderson, Brown University
    Joan Scott, Institute of Advanced Studies • Trump
    Zahid R. Chaudhary, Princeton University • Impunity

    Video

    Session 2

    Moderator: Ann Stoler, The New School
    Brian Meeks, Brown University • Hegemony
    Lisa Lowe, Tufts University • Migrant

    Video

    Session 3

    Moderator: Elizabeth Weed (Brown University)
    Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University • Academic Freedom
    Beshara Doumani, Brown University • Academy

    Video

    Session 4

    Moderator: Leela Gandhi (Brown University)
    Benjamin Parker, Brown University • Disruption
    Anthony Bogues, Brown University • Disobedience

    Video

    YouTube playlist
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    October 27 and 28, 2017

    This colloquium brought together interdisciplinary scholars, educators, artists, activists and community organizers to participate in a pedagogic experiment using the ‘workshop’ as a site of exchange. Participants explored an ecologically grounded humanistic pedagogy that deployed entry points of the everyday –memories and languages, food and health, art and performance, livelihood and dwelling.

    Speakers included: Amanda Anderson, Brown University; Thomas Asher, Social Science Research Council (SSRC); Ariella Azoulay, Brown University; Debjani Bhattacharyya, Drexel University; Yoko Inoue, Bennington College; Gaye Theresa Johnson, University of California/Los Angeles; Aarti Kawlra, International Institute for Asian Studies; Trica Keaton, Dartmouth College; Philippe Peycam, International Institute for Asian Studies; Frank Leon Roberts, New York University; Tricia Rose, Brown University; Tharaphi Than, North Illinois University/Dekalb; Françoise Vergès, Visiting Professor of Humanities, Cogut Institute, and Global South(s), Collège d’études mondiales/Paris.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    September 15, 2017

    Can the very suggestion of the existence of sacred spaces within popular culture constitute an insoluble challenge? Or does the idea offer novel possibilities for the exploration of an inevitable coexistence whose critical examination promises to advance our understanding of life, religion and culture in India and Pakistan? This colloquium explored themes of the sacred and popular culture through the medium of film. 

    Session 1 [Video]
    “Iqbal’s Political Theology”
    Faisal Devji, St. Antony’s College/Oxford University
    Moderator: Shahzad Bashir, Religious Studies/Middle East Studies

    Session 2 [Video]
    “Bhagwan se baat kare ka communication system ye gola ka … total lul ho chuka hai (This planet’s communication system for talking to God is totally useless): Coming to Terms with the Sacred in Indian Cinema”
    Rachel Dwyer, University of London
    Moderator: Ákos Östör, Wesleyan University, emeritus

    Session 3 - Graduate Student Panel
    “Sacred Bodies: Intimate Labor and Race in Bangalore, India”
    Andrea Wright, Anthropology

    “Death of a Gharana? Queer Inclusion between Social Reproduction and Decay”
    Brian Horton, Anthropology

    “Locating the Numinous Within the Insurgent on the Indo-Afghan Frontier”
    Abhilash Medhi, History

    “The Graveyards of Paradise: Memorialization in Kashmir’s Present”
    Suvaid Yaseen, History

    Moderators: Lina Fruzzetti, Anthropology
    and Anani Dzidzienyo, Africana Studies

    Session 4 [Video]
    Final Roundtable/Panel Moderators: Lina Fruzzetti, Anthropology
    and Anani Dzidzienyo, Africana Studies

    Co-sponsored by Anthropology, Pembroke Center, Graduate School, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Africana Studies, Religious Studies, the Heimark Fund, Watson Institute, Office of International Programs, Office of Global Engagement, South Asian Center, Office of Campus and Student Life, and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.

  •  Location: Watson InstituteRoom: Joukowsky Forum

    April 21, 2017

    The modern world can be seen as a triumph of enlightenment thought, of scientific progress, and of collective endeavor for the betterment of human kind. The modern world is also a result of massive displacement of populations, a phenomenon that is historically unprecedented in scale, violence, and longevity. This phenomenon began with the “discovery” of the New World and the near eradication of its inhabitants who constituted roughly a third of the world’s population in 1500. This seismic encounter unleashed waves of displacements across the globe over the next few centuries powered by European colonial expansion, the slave trade, the creation of new ecological environments through the exchange of plants and microbes, introduction of new agricultural systems, and the dislocations of industrialization. The encounter also shaped core knowledge regimes and generated classificatory categories about the human, society, economy, and nature that informed political cultures and social relations.

    During the Twentieth century, systematic forced displacement through ethnic cleansing and genocide reached an industrial scale as states engaged in world wars, imposed partition plans, ruthlessly engineered societies, and undertook large-scale infrastructural projects such as dams and mines. Climate change as well as the construction of vast systems of barriers and surveillance to control the movement of undesirable persons along the seams of national, ethnic, sectarian, and class boundaries are creating new forms of displacement whose consequences are as of yet not clear. Contested claims over resources and transformation of social values too have played their role in the forced movement of people.

    These themes suggest that displacement can best understood as a long-term generative process that is fundamental to the very structures of modernity – to its political forms, to its institutions, to its advances in science and technology, and to its literary and aesthetic experience.

    The central aim of this conference – as the flagship event in the 2016-2017 Sawyer Seminar – was to engage an interdisciplinary commons, informed by the approaches and concerns of displacement in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Specifically, it occurred under three overarching themes that invite disparate studies of displacement into a single intellectual arena that can be generative of new lines of inquiry:

    • Histories: Displacement as a global and historically enduring phenomenon.
    • Ecologies: Displacement as an ecological and technological phenomenon.
    • Subjectivities: Displacement as a discursive phenomenon.
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    Are we paying enough attention? Or the right kinds of attention? We are told that people suffer more than ever from deficits of attention (a word often thought about in economic metaphors) and from an impoverishment of its range and richness. But what are we doing when we are paying attention, and how do we describe its value? This conference started from the suggestions that powerful claims about attention link criticism to political and social theory and psychoanalysis and from the speculation that the conjunction of these disciplines yield new insights into the stakes of our attentions. View full video playlist.

    FRIDAY, April 7, 2017

    Panel 1 [Video]
    Leo Bersani, University of California/Berkeley • “The Choreographed Cure”
    Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University • “Creating and Dissolving: Attention, Stillness, and the Ephemeral in Ritual Life”
    Moderator: Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Brown University

    Panel 2 [Video]
    David Russell,Oxford University • “Ruskin’s Vision”
    Sergio Delgado, Harvard University • “Lygia Clark, At Home with Objects”
    Moderator: Ourida Mostefai, Brown University

    Panel 3 [Video]
    Toril Moi, Duke University • “Language and Attention: Morality and Literature after Wittgenstein”
    Nancy YousefCity University of New York • “Unresolved: Attention and Form in Eliot and Wittgenstein”
    Helen Small, Oxford University • “Particular Attention”
    Moderator: Timothy Bewes, Brown University

    Adam Phillips, Psychoanalyst/Writer • “On ‘Vacancies of Attention’” [Video]

    SATURDAY, April 8, 2017

    Panel 4 [Video]
    Rita Felski, University of Virginia • “Getting It: Art and Attunement”
    Matthew Bevis, Oxford University  • “On Distraction”
    Moderator: Leela Gandhi, Brown University

    Panel 5 [Video]
    Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania • “The Natural History of Attention”
    Amanda Anderson, Brown University • “The Scale of Attention”
    Moderator: Jacques Khalip, Brown University

    Panel 6 [Video]
    Bonnie Honig, Brown University • “‘ATTENTION!’ Or, Postures of Refusal: ‘Walking,’ Antigone, and The Bacchae
    Joshua Chambers-Letson, Northwestern University • “A Tension: White Deficit, Blackness and Disorder”
    Moderator: Andre Willis, Brown University

    Panel 7 [Video]
    Minnie Scott, Tate Gallery • “Regimes of Attention in the Contemporary Art Museum”
    Jeff Nunokawa, Princeton University • “Stopping in the Woods of a Blurry Newsfeed—Getting Attention on Social Media When What You Have to Offer Isn’t Pictures of Puppies or Porn”
    Moderator: Benjamin Parker, Brown University

    This conference was co-organized by Amanda Anderson (Brown University) and David Russel (Oxford University), and co-sponsored by the Columbia University Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, Brown in the World/The World at Brown, and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    March 3, 2017

    This conference brought together scientists, clinicians, meditation teachers, and scholars from various academic disciplines to explore somatic and affective changes associated with Buddhist meditation. Situating the practice of meditation in multiple cultural contexts in Asia and the West allowed the speakers to examine how experiences are appraised in relationship to varying and occasionally conflicting sets of expectations, goals, and conceptual frameworks. Given the increasingly widespread application of Buddhist-based practices such as “mindfulness meditation” in the West, speakers were particularly interested in seeing how unexpected, challenging, or difficult meditation experiences are situated in relation to religious, scientific, and biomedical epistemologies, as well as the role of various social agents–practitioners, teachers, scientists, and chilicians–in ascribing meaning and value to particular experiences.

    Panel 1
    Daniel Stuart, University of South Carolina • The Place of the Body in Vipassana: Perspectives from India and the US
    Julia Cassiniti, Washington State University • Questioning the Modern in the Bodily and Affective Practices of Southeast Asian Mindfulness Meditation

    Panel 2
    Willoughby Britton, Brown University • Mechanisms of Mindfulness and Trauma: Embodiment and Dissociation
    David Treleaven, California Institute of Integral Studies • Approaches to Trauma in Somatic Experiencing and the Western Vipassana Movement

    Panel 3
    Geoffrey Samuel, University of Sydney and Cardiff University, emeritusRelaxation, Arousal, Mindfulness, and Tantric Practice: How Different is Vajrayana Meditation?
    Anne Klein, Rice University • Body, Mind, and Bodhicitta: Dualism and Wholeness in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism
    Jared Lindahl, Brown University • Bodily Energies and Emotional Traumas: Practice-Related Challenges Reported by Vajrayāna Buddhists in the West

    Concluding Presentation and Discussion
    Laurence Kirmayer, McGill University • Cultural Neurophenomenology and the Politics of Meditative Experience

    This conference was convened by Professors Willoughby Britton and Jared Lindahl, Brown University, and was supported by a collaborative research grant from the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation in Buddhist Studies and the American Council for Learned Societies.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    February 24, 2017

    This conference will examined the debates surrounding the place of Islam in French society today. Focusing on the current polemics surrounding Laïcité—a uniquely French phenomenon that differs fundamentally from other forms of secularization in that the State guarantees the private practice of religion while insisting on a strict separation of Church and State—participants investigated the emergence of a new public visibility of Islam in the West and the anxieties it is generating. On the one hand, Islam is seen by some as a fundamentally different religion posing a new, specific threat that makes it incompatible with French identity and modernity. On the other, because it is the religion of immigrants from Muslim countries, its practice is seen as posing particular challenges to French society, as the controversies over the headscarf and halal meat testify. In the context of European integration, globalization, and migrations, recent debates over French identity have focused on Islam and are reshaping the intellectual and political landscape. The goal of this conference was to achieve a better understanding of the contemporary place of religion and religiosity in public life. View full video playlist.

    Panel 1 [Video]
    Ian Coller, University of California, Irvine • Islam before Laïcité: The French Revolution and the Muslim Citizen
    Ethan Katz, University of Cincinnati • Under Every Hijab Can be a Kippah: The Uncertain Place of Jews in Contemporary Debates about Islam in France
    Moderator: Maud Mandel, Brown University

    Panel 2 [Video]
    Naomi Davidson, University of Ottawa • “Je veux que l’islam brille au coeur de la République”: Making Islam Public in 20th-Century France
    Mayanthi L. Fernando, University of California, Santa Cruz • Sex and Secularism: The Embodied Politics of Public/Private
    Moderator: Gretchen Schultz, Brown University

    Panel 3 [Video]
    John Bowen, Washington University • The Specificity of Scandal: Halal, Handshakes and Sociability in France and the Netherlands
    Nadia Marzouki, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) • Academic Freedom in the Context of the French “War on Terror”
    Moderator: Kelly Colvin, Brown University

    Concluding Roundtable Discussion with all participants [Video]
    Moderator: Ourida Mostefai, Brown University

    This conference was convened by Lewis Seifert, Brown University, and co-sponsored by the French Embassy in the United States, Pierre and Mary Ann Sorel ’92, Dean of the College, Department of French Studies, the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and the Humanities Initiative.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    Session 5

    Moderator: Kevin McLaughlin, Brown University
    Judith Butler, University of California/Berkeley • Religion
    Patrice Maniglier, Université Paris Ouest/Nanterre • Materialism
    Monique David-Ménard, Université Paris VII; Institute for Cultural Inquiry • Conversion

    Video

    Session 6

    Moderator: Lukas Rieppel, Brown University
    Ann Stoler, New School for Social Research • Interior Frontier
    Stathis Gourgouris, Columbia University • Border

    Video

    Session 7 

    Moderator: Timothy Bewes, Brown University
    Michel Feher, Zone Books • Investee
    Bernard Harcourt, Columbia University • Contre/Counter

    Video

    Session 8

    Moderator: Bonnie Honig, Brown University
    Peter Osborne, Kingston University • Subject
    Étienne Balibar, Université Paris Ouest/Nanterre; Columbia University • Concept

    Video

    YouTube playlist
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    Session 1 

    Moderator: Amanda Anderson, Brown University
    Jacques Lezra, New York University • Relation
    Ellen Rooney, Brown University • Trope

    Video

    Session 2 

    Moderator: Sharon Krause, Brown University
    Jay Bernstein, New School for Social Research • Rights
    Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Study/Princeton • Punishment

    Video

    Session 3 

    Moderator: Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Brown University
    Emily Apter, New York University • Equaliberty
    Adi Ophir, Brown University • Political

    Video

    Session 4 

    Moderator: Susan Buck-Morss, City University of New York
    Charles Mills, City University of New York • Race
    Gary Wilder, City University of New York • Solidarity
    Bruce Robbins, Columbia University • Anthropological

    Video

    YouTube playlist
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    October 15, 2016

    This colloquium considered knowledges from the vantage point of local experience and artistic practice in the American hemisphere. More than recounting how the nature/culture divide came about, speakers considered the ways in which both nature and civilization were differently conceived. View full video playlist.

    Panel 1 [Video]
    Heather F. Roller, Colgate University • ‘On the Verge of Total Extinction’? Reframing Indigenous History in Nineteenth-Century Brazil
    Pedro de Niemeyer Cesarino, University of São Paulo • Amerindian Shamanism and the Politics of Things
    Respondent: Dana Graef, Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities, Anthropology

    Panel 2 [Video]
    Lucia Sá, University of Manchester • Metamorphosis and Ætiology: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Native Amazonian Narratives
    Pablo F. Gómez, University of Wisconsin/Madison • A Caribbean Natural History: Blacks, Amerindians and the Creation of the New World
    Respondent: Joshua Tucker, Music Faculty

    Panel 3 [Video]
    Brigitte Baptiste, Instituto Humboldt/Columbia University • From Local Knowledge to Global Ecology: Scales and Indigenous Communities
    Gustavo Procopio Furtado, Duke University • Reparative Mediations: Indigeneity, Documentary Video, and the Future of the Ethnographic Archive
    Respondent: James Green, History Faculty

    This colloquium was co-sponsored by History of Art and Architecture, Brazil Initiative, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Hispanic Studies, Comparative Literature, Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Humanities Initiative, Arts Initiative, Watson Collaboration Grant, Anthropology, CV Starr Foundation Lectureship, Science and Technology Studies, Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    March 11, 2016

    In 2015/2016 events in the Middle East, Africa and Europe have led to popular movements that have been described as the largest refugee crisis since WWII. This demanded a response, and how this crisis is defined, mediated, and understood is central to the responses (global and local, personal and political, affective and activist) that can be generated. This day-long workshop, along with an accompanying visual archive, considered the question of “what is a refugee crisis?” focused on media combined with political theory.

    Speakers included Lorenzo Pezzani and Charles Heller, Forensic Architecture; Thomas Keenan, Bard College; Mezna Qato, Cambridge University; Paul Feigelfeld, Leuphana University; Itamar Mann, Georgetown University; Alessandro Petti, De-colonizing Architecture Art Residency; Ayten Gundogdu, Barnard College. Brown faculty participants included Ariella Azoulay, Comparative Literature/Modern Culture and Media; Beshara Doumani, History/Middle East Studies; Bonnie Honig, Political Science/Modern Culture and Media; Lynne Joyrich, Modern Culture and Media; Nicola Perugini, Italian Studies/Middle East Studies; Sarah Tobin, Middle East Studies; and Vazira Zamindar, History.

    Watch recorded sessions of this symposium on YouTube.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    February 12, 2016

    European conceptions of alphabetic letters, and their relation by parallel and analogy to pictures and to methods of recording and remembering, were principally derived from classical grammatical and rhetorical theory. This symposium explored how those conceptions have been modified or transformed in the multicultural environment of colonial Spanish America and reassessed the far-reaching implications of those changes.

    Panel 1 – Contexts and Comparisons
    John Bodel, Brown University, Chair
    Felipe Rojas, Brown University • At the Margins of Script: Interaction with Unknown Scripts before Decipherment
    Andrew Laird, Brown University • Transatlantic Transformations of Letters and Mnemotechnics
    Respondent: Nicholas Carter, Haffenreffer/Peabody Museum

    Panel 2 – From Pictogram to Letter
    Iris Montero Sobrevilla, Brown University, Chair
    Gordon Whittaker, Göttingen University • How to Write Spanish in Aztec Hieroglyphs: A 16th Century Mesoamerican Response to a European Alphabet
    Jessica Stair, University of California/Berkeley • Textual-Pictorial Literacies in the Techialoyan Manuscripts of New Spain Respondent
    Respondent: Kenneth Ward, Brown University

    Panel 3 – Alphabets and Alphabetisation
    Jeffrey Muller, Brown University, Chair
    Laura Leon Llerena, Northwestern University • The Illegible as a Clue: Indigenous Appropriation and Transformation of Alphabetic Writing in Colonial Peru
    Thomas Cummins, Harvard University • The Pretty-Letter: The Aesthetic Alphabet and the Rest of the World
    Respondent: Parker Van Valkenburgh, Brown University

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    Session 5

    Moderator: Tim Bewes, Brown University
    Joanna Howard, Brown University • Possession
    William Keach, Brown University • Property

    Video

    Session 6 

    Moderator: Stephen Bush, Brown University
    Lukas Rieppel, Brown University • Nature
    Anna Bialek, Brown University • Indeterminacy

    Video

    Session 7 

    Moderator: Gerhard Richter, Brown University
    Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Brown University • Abiura
    Rebecca Schneider, Brown University • Gesture

    Video

    Session 8 

    Moderator: Thangam Ravindranathan, Brown University
    Ariella Azoulay, Brown University • Sovereignty
    James Kuzner, Brown University • Bondage

    Video

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    Session 1

    Moderator: Amanda Anderson, Brown University
    Sharon Krause, Brown University • Agency
    James Schmidt, Boston University • Publicity

    Video

    Session 2

    Moderator: Nathaniel Berman, Brown University
    Alex Gourevitch, Brown University • Strike
    Thomas A. Lewis, Brown University • Formation

    Video

    Session 3

    Moderator: Bonnie Honig, Brown University
    Joan Cocks, Mount Holyoke College • Disappearance
    Branka Arsic, Columbia University • Desert

    Video

    Session 4

    Moderator: Adi Ophir, Brown University
    Marc Redfield, Brown University • Shibboleth
    Vazira Zamindar, Brown University • Minority

    Video

    YouTube playlist
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    September 25, 2015

    This symposium addressed the question of the power of images over thought in the context of recent concerns over terrorism, and the challenge it poses for criticism and critique. Is there an aesthetics of terror? How is satire implicated in the politics of the spectacle? And what is the relationship between theological traditions of iconoclasm and secular commitments to think outside the sphere of recycled images?

    Speakers included: Sadia Abbas, Rutgers University; Ariella Azoulay, Brown University; Faisal Devji, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford; Rosalind Morris, Columbia University; Bruce Robbins, Columbia University; and David Wills, Brown University.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    Session 5

    Moderator: Marc Redfield
    Jacques Khalip • Triumph
    Peter Szendy • Katechon

    Video

    Session 6

    Moderator: Ravit Reichman
    Stephen Bush • Ecstasy
    Michael Sawyer • Sacrifice

    Video

    Session 7

    Moderator: Rebecca Schneider
    Timothy Bewes • Free indirect
    Amanda Anderson • Character

    Video

    Session 8

    Moderator: Michael Steinberg
    David Wills • Blood
    Jacques Rancière • Occupation

    Video

    YouTube playlist
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    Session 1

    Moderator: Bonnie Honig
    Elizabeth Weed • Reality
    Thangam Ravindranathan • Missing

    Video

    Session 2

    Moderator: Adi Ophir
    Beshara Doumani • Region
    Lukas Rieppel • Organization

    Video

    Session 3

    Moderator: Lynne Joyrich
    Susan Bernstein • Synaesthesia
    Philip Rosen • Cinematic

    Video

    Session 4

    Moderator: Joan Copjec
    Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg • Reclamation
    Gerhard Richter •Inheritance

    Video

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    November 14, 2014

    An informal conversation about transformations and opportunities for the humanities both within Asia as well as in the context of transcontinental university relations. China, India, and Japan were considered, as well as shifting disciplinary boundaries including those between the humanities and the social sciences.

    Speakers included Ping-Chen Hsiung, Chinese University of Hong Kong; James Chandler, University of Chicago; Alan Tansman, University of California/Berkeley; and Leela Gandhi, Brown University.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    October 17, 2014

    There is now a critical mass of innovative scholars in the US, Europe, and the Arab world who argue that the formation of the Modern West was influenced by Islamic civilization. The field has grown quantitatively and qualitatively, with new lines of inquiry pushing in several new directions simultaneously. This colloquium brought together scholars in an informal setting to take stock of research trends, identify promising new questions and sources, exchange experiences and insights, and set the stage for more symposiums and conferences on the topic.

    Some questions addressed by the speakers: What were the influences on the modern west of Islamic civilization? Why has mainstream scholarship been slow and/or resistant to embrace research on these Islamic influences as a core part of the history of philosophy, social theory and science in the modern world? What could and should be done to develop this area of research and to extend its broader academic and public influence and impact?

    Speakers included: Muhammad Ali Khalidi, Department of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Program, York University; Karla Mallette, Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan/Ann Arbor; Jamil Ragep, Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University; and Shaden Tageldin, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota/Twin Cities.

    Convened by Cogut Institute Postdoctoral Fellows in International Humanities Mayssun Succarie (Middle East Studies) and Rafael Nájera (Philosophy).

  •  Location: Pembroke Hall, Room 305

    Session 5 

    Elias Muhanna, Brown University • Vernacular
    Jacques Lezra, New York University • Like
    Moderator: Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University

    Video

    Session 6

    Eduardo Cadava, Princeton University • Trees
    Bonnie Honig, Brown University • Resilience
    Moderator: Barrymore A. Bogues, Brown University

    Video

    Session 7

    Ariella Azoulay, Brown University • Human Rights
    Federico Finchelstein, The New School • Populism
    Moderator: Stathis Gourgouris, Columbia University

    Video

    Session 8

    Roundtable with Jay Bernstein, Akeel Bilgrami, Stathis Gourgouris, Adi Ophir, and Ann Stoler (Chair and Participant)

    Video

    YouTube playlist
  •  Location: Pembroke Hall, Room 305

    Session 1

    Moderator: Michael Steinberg, Brown University
    Étienne Balibar, Columbia University and Université de Paris X • Exploitation
    Andreas Kalyvas, The New School • Statelessness

    Video

    Session 2

    Moderator: Susan Bernstein, Brown University
    Ellen Rooney, Brown University • Reading
    Linda Quiquivix, Brown University • Map

    Video unavailable

    Session 3

    Moderator: Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Brown University
    A. Kiarina Kordela
    , Macalester College • Horror
    Nathaniel Berman
    , Brown University • Demonization

    Video

    Session 4

    Moderator: Jay Bernstein, The New School
    Kevin McLaughlin, Brown University • Raison d’État
    Adi Ophir, Brown University • Concept (ii)

    Video

    YouTube playlist
  •  Location: Pembroke Hall, Room 305

    February 24, 2012

    This panel opened a conversation across disciplines to think with and about music in translation. Panelists Jacqueline Rose (Queen Mary, University of London) and composer Mohammed Fairouz addressed questions including: How does engagement with classical genres and forms (the symphony and the sonata) inform a contemporary musical agenda? How does it inform a political agenda? How does instrumental music engage literary and critical texts, including States of Fantasy and The Last Resistance? 

    “The Last Resistance,” a program of Fairouz’s piano music inspired by the writings of Jacqueline Rose and Edward Said, was offered on February 23, 2012 in Martinos Auditorium at the Granoff Creative Arts Center. 

    Watch the recording of this program on Vimeo.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    February 17, 2012

    The concept of the “contemporary” has haunted romantic writers and philosophers, and has often been a vexed starting point for discussions of innovation, nostalgia, historical situatedness, presentism, and futurity. Indeed, what romanticism appears to signal, as a complex—or what Forest Pyle has called a “constellation”—of aesthetic, political, moral, and social considerations, often translates into discussions of its own conceptual afterlife. In other words, romanticism as irreducible to periodization, and more of a movement of thought that continues to saturate our contemporary and future moments. As a call for interdisciplinarity, romanticism just as often shatters the linkages it presumes to make between genres, forms, and fields. This symposium specifically aimed to assemble both romantic specialists and scholars from outside the field in order to create dialogues and projects around the particularity and portability of “romanticism.” It threw into relief the refractions, theoretical linkages, and intermedial permutations of romanticism throughout contemporary culture and aesthetics, as well as trace its enduring remains. The objective was to locate instances where texts, films, paintings, and theoretical interventions sustain an engagement with romantic literature and thought, and offer new perspectives on a romanticism that never settles for the present, but is always motile and evocative of something yet to come.

    Speakers included: Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University), Lee Edelman (Tufts University), Elizabeth Fay (UMass/Boston), Jerrold Hogle (University of Arizona), Forest Pyle (University of Oregon), and Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University).

    This colloquium was convened by Jacques Khalip, Professor of English at Brown University.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    February 26, 2010

    It has been twenty-five years since the death of Michel Foucault, one of the last century’s most crucial philosophers, as well as twenty-five years since the publication of the final two volumes of Histoire de la Sexualité. Since then, an extraordinary body of interdisciplinary scholarship has emerged around the work of Foucault, with much attention recently focused on his writings on ethics, governmentality, biopolitics, and war. Future Foucault invited six distinguished scholars to address the timeliness of these topics, and to reflect upon the abiding presence of Foucault in their own critical thought.

    Speakers:
    Tim Dean, SUNY/Buffalo, “Why is Pleasure ‘a Very Difficult Behavior’?”
    Anne F. Garréta, Duke University, “Self or Subject? Technology or Hermeneutics? Care or knowledge?”
    Janet Halley, Harvard Law School, “Governmentality Today?: The Example of Governance Feminism”
    Mark Hansen, Duke University, “Individuation, Disindividuation, Transindividuation”
    William Haver, Binghamton University/SUNY, “Reading Foucault’s Genet Lectures”
    Elizabeth Povinelli, Columbia University, “Ethical Substance and Endurance in Late Liberalism”

    This conference was convened by Jacques Khalip, Professor of English at Brown University. It was co-sponsored by the Departments of French Studies, Philosophy, Anthropology, Comparative Literature, English, Modern Culture and Media, the Pembroke Center for Research and Teaching on Women and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, as well as the Consulate General of France in Boston.