Speakers and Topics since our inception
2022-23 Season
All events are free of charge and open to the public.
Thursday, March 30 - Jonathan Zimmerman
5:30-7:00pm, Carolyn Pope Edwards Hall, Room 227
Thursday, April 20 - Christopher Newfield & Julia Schleck
5:30-7:00pm, Sheldon Museum of Art, Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium
Thursday, April 27- Austin McCoy
5:30-7:00pm, Sheldon Museum of Art, Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium
2021-22 “A World of Migrants: Displacement, Decoloniality, Necrocapitalism”
Thursday, September 16 - Sergio Delgado Moya
Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University
“The Transduction of Affect: Migrants, Pain and Joy”
5:30-7:00pm, Sheldon Museum of Art, Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium
Thursday, November 18 - Ramon Grosfoguel
Associate Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California Berkeley
“Modernity, Racism, and Migration: A Journey into the Zone of Being and Zone of Non-Being”
5:30-7:00pm, Zoom
Thursday, March 10 - Thomas Nail
Professor of Philosophy, University of Denver
“The Climate Migration Industrial Complex” 5:30-7:00pm, Sheldon Museum of Art, Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium
Thursday, April 21 - Anna Arabindan-Kesson
Assistant Professor, Department of African American Studies & Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University
“Plantation Imaginaries: Immigrant Forms and Forms of Enclosure”
5:30-7:00pm, Sheldon Museum of Art, Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium
2020-2021 Season
Thursday, March 18 - Cristina Rivera Garza
Author and Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies, University of Houston
“Writing in Communality: An Aesthetics of Disappropriation”
5:30-7:00pm Virtual Lecture
2019-2020 Season
All events are free of charge and open to the public.
Thursday, September 5 - Annie McClanahan
Associate Professor of English, UC Irvine
“Tipwork, Gigwork, Automation”
5:30-7:00pm, Sheldon Museum of Art, Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium
Thursday, October 31 - Claire Colebrook
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Philosophy, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Penn State University
“What would you do (and who would you kill) in order to save the world?: Post-Apocalyptic Cinema and Extinction”
5:30-7:00pm, Sheldon Museum of Art, Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium
Thursday, March 5 - Sayak Valencia
Professor and Researcher in the Department of Cultural Studies, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte
“From Gore Capitalism to Snuff Politics: The Body as Mass Media”
5:30-7:00pm, Sheldon Museum of Art, Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium
**Postponed** - Lauren Berlant
George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago
“Being in Life Without Wanting the World; Suicideation, Dissociation, Survival”
2018-2019: Post-Truth Futures
All events are free of charge and open to the public.
Thursday, October 11 - Kent A. Ono
Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Utah
“The Rhetoric of Sanctuary in the Post-Truth Era”
5:30-7:00pm, Sheldon Museum of Art, Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium
Thursday, October 25 - Lee McIntyre
Research Fellow, Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and Instructor in Ethics, Harvard Extension School
“Post-Truth in the Internet Age”
5:30-7:00pm, Sheldon Museum of Art, Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium
Thursday, March 7 - Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University
5:30-7:00pm, Sheldon Museum of Art, Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium
Thursday, April 18 - Charlotte Biltekoff
Associate Professor of American Studies and Food Science and Technology, UC Davis
“Real Food / Real Facts: Truth, Politics, and Power in the U.S. Food and Information Landscape”
5:30-7:00pm, Sheldon Museum of Art, Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium
2017-2018: Post-Revolutionary Futures
Thursday, Sep 28 - Timothy Scott Brown
Professor of History, Northeastern University
“Is Revolution Still Possible? The Crisis of Capitalism and the Meaning of 1968”
Thurs Oct 19 - Ronald Judy
Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies in the Department of English, University of Pittsburgh
“Restless Flying from Haiti to Tunisia: What is ‘After Revolution’ Anyway?”
Fri Feb 9 - João Salles
Documentary Filmmaker and President of the Instituto Moreira Salles, Brazil
No Intenso Agora (In the Intense Now, 2017) Film Screening and Q&A
Thurs Mar 15 - Tim Dean
Professor of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“Hatred of Sex”
Thurs Apr 19 - Bridget R. Cooks
Associate Professor of African American Studies and Art History, University of California, Irvine
“Black Artists and Activism: Harlem on My Mind, 1969”
2016-2017: Post-Racial Futures?
Thursday, Sep 22 - Milton S.F. Curry
Associate Dean of Academic and Strategic Initiatives and Associate Professor of Architecture, University of Michigan
“The Racial After-Image of Architecture Ideology”
Thurs Oct 13 - Sue J. Kim
Co-Director of the Center for Asian American Studies, and the Nancy K. Donahue Endowed Professor in the Arts,
University of Massachusetts Lowell
“Postmodern Fatigue: Post-Racial Fallacies”
Thurs Mar 2 - Alexandre Da Costa
Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies, University of Alberta
“Towards a Hemispheric Critique of the Post-racial”
Thurs Apr 13 - Kirsten Pai Buick
Professor of Art History, University of New Mexico
“Slavery Makes the Woman: Historical and Racial Linkages in the Creative Practices of Mary Edmonia Lewis and Kara Walker”
2015-2016: Posthuman Futures
Thurs Sept 17 - Debra Hawhee
Professor of English, Penn State University
“Aristotle and Animal Feeling”
Thurs Oct 29 - Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
Assistant Professor of English, George Mason University
“The Blackness of Space Between Matter and Meaning”
Thurs Mar 3 - Saya Woolfalk
Independent Artist
“Saya Woolfalk: World Builder”
Thurs Mar 31 - John Durham Peters
Professor of Communication Studies, University of Iowa
“Do Clouds Have Meaning? On the Relation Between Media and Nature"
2014-2015: States of Exception
Thurs Oct 2 - Ursula Heise
Professor, Department of English/Institute of the Environment & Sustainability, UCLA
“BioCities: Urban Futures and the Reinvention of Nature”
Thurs Nov 6 - Gregg Lambert
Dean’s Professor of the Humanities, Syracuse University
“To Have Done with the State of Exception”
Thurs Mar 19 - Adam Kotsko
Assistant Professor of Humanities, Shimer College
“The Prince of This World: The Devil and Political Theology”
Thurs Apr 2 - Siva Vaidhyanathan
Robertson Professor in Media studies, University of Virginia
“The Operating System of Your Life: How Tech Companies and Big Data Govern Your Identity, Knowledge, and Refrigerator”
Mar 13 - Cristina Rodríguez
Professor of Law, Yale Law School
“Immigration Reform and the Political Value of Manufactured Crises”
2013-2014: Economies of Crisis/Crises of Economies
Oct 24 - Carsten Strathausen
Professor of German and English, University of Missouri
“Bio-Capitalism and the Crisis of Economics”
Nov 7 - Joshua Clover
Professor of English, University of California - Davis
“Is Crisis Theory?”
Feb 27 - Dierdre McCloskey
Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication, University of Illinois-Chicago
“Humanomics: Or, Why Neo-Classical, Neo-Marxist, and Neo-Institutionalist Views of History and the Economy are Wrong”
Mar 13 - Cristina Rodríguez
Professor of Law, Yale Law School
“Immigration Reform and the Political Value of Manufactured Crises” (rescheduled for Spring 2015)
Apr 10 - Imre Szeman
Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and Professor of English, Film Studies, and Sociology at the University of Alberta
“On Empty: The Cultural Politics of Oil”
2012-2013: Aesthetics/Performance/Politics
Oct 11 - Mark Greif
Assistant Professor of Literary Studies, New School University, and editor of N+1 Magazine
“Reality in America: A Counter-Aesthetic for the Present”
Nov 29 - Lutz Koepnick
Professor of German, Film and Media Studies, and Comparative Literature, Washington University in St. Louis
“Cave/Cinema: Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotton Dreams and the Politics of Time”
Feb 21 - E. Patrick Johnson
Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies, Northwestern University
“Going Home Ain't Always Easy: Performance and Ethics in the Black Gay South”
Mar 28 - Kristin Ross
Professor of Comparative Literature, New York University
“Communal Luxury”
2011-2012: Biopower/Biopolitics
Oct 13 - Sara Guyer
Associate Professor of English, University of Wisconsin
“‘A Poet is born not made:’ John Clare’s Grave and the Politics of Life”
Nov 17 - Jodi Dean
Professor of Political Science, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
“Communicative Capitalism: This is what Democracy Looks Like”
Mar 29 - Michael Hardt
Professor of Literature and Italian Studies, Duke University and Professor of Political Literature, European Graduate School
“What to Do in a Crisis: A Biopolitical New Deal”
Apr 12 - Cesare Casarino
Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota
“Universalism of the Common”
2010-2011: The Political Turn
Nov 11 - Dr. Steven Shaviro
DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University
“'Despite everything I am still not ashamed of my Communist past:' Some Revolutionary Thoughts on Eastern European Film”
Nov 18 - Dr. Jeffrey T. Nealon
Liberal Arts Research Professor of English, Penn State
“Can Literature Be Equipment for Post-Postmodern Living?”
Mar 31 - Dr. Sande Cohen
Emeritus Professor of Critical Studies, California Institute for the Arts and Distinguished Visiting Professor
“Criticism in the Age of Anti-Intellectualism”
Apr 21 - Dr. Ernesto Laclau
Emeritus Professor of Politics, University of Essex and Distinguished Visiting Professor
“The Discursive Construction of Social Antagonisms”
