With the proliferation of online lectures, working groups and all manner of events, we at the JHI Blog thought it would be a good idea to consolidate news and opportunities relevant to our colleagues working in intellectual history. We will publish these roundups of public lectures, conferences, calls for papers, working groups and new journal issues every other Saturday.
We encourage our readers to send us information and updates about any news or events that fits within this scope. You can use this form to let us know about something you’d like us to publicize.
Discussion: “Who Needs a Worldview? Raymond Geuss in Conversation”
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research faculty Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Michael Stevenson, and Rebecca Ariel Porte will welcome world-renowned philosopher Raymond Geuss for a wide-ranging discussion of Geuss’s most recent book Who Needs a Worldview? (Harvard).
The event is free to attend and will stream live to the BISR Facebook page.
February 28, 2:00pm EST. Sign up.
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Panel: “Health, Disease, and Early American Environments”
This panel discussion brings together the histories of health, disease, and the environment to cast new light on key sites of Colonial American history. With authors Molly Nebiolo (Northeastern University) and Camden Elliott (Harvard University), commentary by Thomas Wickman (Trinity College). Part of the Pauline Maier Early American History Seminar.
March 2, 5:15 – 6:30pm EST. Register.
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Lecture: “Microhistory and Global History,” with Carlo Ginzburg
The Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies has invited internationally renowned historian Carlo Ginzburg to reflect on his pioneering research in conversation with historian Francesca Trivellato of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. The discussion will touch on the relationship between micro-history and global history, the relevance of Ginzburg’s work for the study of the Jews and marginalized others, the intersections between his life and his work, and the nature of the historian’s craft, among other topics that have been illumined by Ginzburg’s fecund and capacious intellect.
March 2, 12:00 – 1:30pm EST. Register.
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Book Launch: Adorno and the Ban on Images, by Sebastian Truskolaski (KCL)
Virtual launch of a new monograph exploring the recurrence of the Old Testament interdiction against image-making in Adorno’s writings, recently published by Bloomsbury Academic. The author will be in conversation with Dr Cat Moir (Germanic Studies, Sydney). Part of KCL’s Comparative Literature research seminar series.
March 3, 5:30pm UTC+01. Register.
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Presentation: “The Dark Green: FIRE,” by Heather Sullivan (Trinity University)
The “dark green” project focuses on narratives revealing plant-human relationships that enable and cultivate human cultures but also the darkly petroleum-fueled industrialization, mass species extinctions, and strange new ecosystems in the Anthropocene allowed by rotted plants in the form of oil, coal, and methane gas. In this talk based on the “FIRE” chapter of the book, the author focuses on literary and scientific explorations of plant-based energy forms as well the many meanings of fire broadly for human culture particularly in the Anthropocene, or the era since the industrial revolution.
Hosted by the Centre for Culture and Ecology, Durham University.
March 4, 7:00pm UTC+01. Register.
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Talk: “Sovversivismo: Gramsci on Reactionary Insurrections,” by Roberto Dainotto
Can a popular insurrection “from below,” passionately fought again constituted power, be the expression of the most reactionary of politics? That was the question that the “fascist revolution” had posed for Antonio Gramsci. The presentation examines Gramsci’s changing attitudes towards sovversivismo, or “subversiveness.” Hosted by the Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University.
March 5, 9:30 – 1:00am EST. Register.
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Film Screening: “I’m No Longer Here” (dir. Fernando Frias)
Join the Spring 2021 Lang Philosophy Film Club series. Everyone with an interest in philosophy, film, and/or convivial conversation about the meaning of what we experience is invited. Each screening will begin and conclude with a discussion facilitated by a member of the NSSR Philosophy Department.
March 5, 7:00 – 10:00pm EST. Register.
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Talk: “Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice,” by Karen Barad (UCSC)
In this talk, Karen Barad will expand upon their pathbreaking article “After the End of the World” (Theory & Event, 2019), which states that “quantum theory is shot through with the political.” In order to demonstrate, in relation to the theme of composite bodies, the highly political nature of not only our modes of meaning making, but of matter, they will outline the socio-political dimensions of their agential realist reworking of quantum physics and will briefly discuss the political nature of matter, followed by a discussion of the article and its implications for notions of justice.
March 10, 5:00pm. Register.
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Lecture: “The Great Departure: Mass Migration and Freedom,” by Tara Zahra (University of Chicago)
Hosted by the Miami University Humanities Center, co-sponsored by the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies.
March 11, 5:00pm. Join via Zoom.
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Colloquium: “Feminized Labor, Sex Work and Precarity”
With Annie McClanahan (UC-Irvine) and Jon-David Settell (UC-Irvine)
This meeting will center around discussion of a paper from Annie McClanahan and Jon-David Settell entitled “Service Work, Sex Work, and the “Prostitute Imaginary.’” It’s the second of three events in a semester-long series of programming addressing the capacious theme “racial capitalism and crisis” Attendees can download the paper here and should read it in advance of the colloquium.
March 11, 12:30-2:00pm. Register.
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Lecture: “Thinking with Adorno: Metaphysical Experience and Aesthetic Autonomy,” by Henry Pickford (Duke)
In the spring of 1969, when Germany was convulsed by popular unrest and police violence, the editor of the German magazine Der Spiegel begins his interview with the philosopher and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno by saying “Professor Adorno, two weeks ago, the world still seemed in order,” to which Adorno responds, “Not to me.” The interview concludes with Adorno asserting, “I am not in the least ashamed to say very publicly that I am working on a major book on aesthetics.”
While Adorno submitted the oppressive tendencies of modern western society to withering critique, his practice as a public intellectual as well as his philosophy also seek to develop capacities of resistance and hope. The talk offers an account of some of these capacities, centering on two concepts advanced by Adorno: metaphysical experience and the riddle-character of modernist art.
March 12, 9:30-11:00am. Register.
Featured Image: Juan Gris, “Fruit Bowl, Book and Newspaper.”
