DeRoy Lecture Series archive
2016
Seb Franklin
Post-Cinema, 1890-
October 31, 2016
Seb Franklin is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at King's College London, where he co-convenes the M.A. in contemporary literature, culture, and theory. He is the author of Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (2015). His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Camera Obscura, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, World Picture, and Cultural Politics.
Geert Lovink
Critical Internet Cultures: From Selfie Cult to Mask Design
April 11, 2016
Geert Lovink is a media theorist, internet critic and author of Dark Fiber (2002), Zero Comment (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012) and Social Media Abyss (2016). Since 2004 he has been a researcher in the School for Communication and Media Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) where he is the director of the Institute of Network Cultures. His centre recently organized conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (politics and aesthetics of online video), Unlike Us (alternatives in social media), Critical Point of View (Wikipedia), Society of the Query (the culture of search), MoneyLab (bitcoins, crowdfunding and internet revenue models) and a project on the future of art criticism. From 2004-2012 he was also an associate professor of media studies (M.A. new media program), University of Amsterdam. Since 2009 he has been a professor at the European Graduate School where he supervises Ph.D. students.
2015
Cathering Keller, professor of constructive theology in the Theological School and Graduate Division of Religion at Drew University
Theopoetics: Mysticism and Material Solidarity
September 25, 2015
Cathering Keller is professor of constructive theology in the Theological School and Graduate Division of Religion at Drew University. She teaches across a spectrum of feminist, ecological, and political theologies, drawing upon poststructuralist and process philosophies, mystical-apophatic and pluralist perspectives. Books she has authored include Apocalypse Now &Then; God & Power; Face of the Deep: a Theology of Becoming; and Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement. She has co-edited numerous volumes of the Drew Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium, including Postcolonial Theologies; Planetary Loves (with G. Spivak); Polydoxy; Ecospirit; the forthcoming Common Good/s: Ecology, Economy and Political Theology (with W. Connolly); and Planetary Entanglement: Religion,Science and New Materialisms (with K. Barad).
Adam Kotsko, assistant professor of Humanities at Shimer College
Creepiness
February 23, 2015
Adam Kotsko is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Shimer College in Chicago. He is the author of the pop-culture trilogy made up of Awkwardness, Why We Love Sociopaths, and Creepiness. He has also written The Politics of Redemption and Zizek and Theology. He has translated several volumes by Giorgio Agamben.
Colin Gardner, University of California, Santa Barbara
Louis Malle's Kleistian War Machine: Becoming Animal in Black Moon
April 24, 2015
Colin Gardner is professor of critical theory and integrative studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches in the departments of Art, Film & Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and the History of Art and Architecture. Gardner has published two books in Manchester University Press's "British Film Makers" series: Joseph Losey (2004), and Karel Reisz (2006). His latest book is Beckett, Deleuze and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art, a critical analysis of Samuel Beckett's experimental work for film and television and its relation to the philosophical writings of Deleuze and Guattari.
2014
Eugenie Brinkema, associate professor of contemporary literature and media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Violence and the Diagram (or, The Human Centipede)
November 14, 2014
Eugenie Brinkema is Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. in 2010 from Brown's Department of Modern Culture and Media. Her articles on film, violence, affect, sexuality, aesthetics, and ethics have appeared in the journals differences, Camera Obscura, Criticism, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and Angelaki: A Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. Recent work includes chapters for the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Michael Haneke and the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Fassbinder, and forthcoming work includes articles on the figure of sincerity in the films of Larry Clark, and rhythms of interruption in contemporary extreme pornography. Her first book, The Forms of the Affects, was published with Duke University Press in 2014.
2013
Francesca Royste, Department of English, DePaul University in Chicago
Michael Jackson and the Trans Erotics of Gender, Race and Age
November 15, 2013
Francesca T. Royster is Professor of English at DePaul University in Chicago, specializing in African American Performance and Cultural Studies, Shakespeare Studies, race, gender and queer theory. She is the author of Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Michigan Press, 2013) and Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon (Palgrave/ MacMillan, 2003), as well as numerous book chapters and scholarly essays in Biography, Women and Performance, Callaloo, Journal of Narrative Theory, Shakespeare Quarterly and others.
Lisa Nakamura, University of Michigan
Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women's Labor, Race, and Gendering in Digital Media History
September 6, 2013
Lisa Nakamura is Professor of Screen Arts and Cultures and American Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press: winner of the Asian American Studies Association 2010 book award in cultural studies), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000) and Race After the Internet (Routledge, 2011). She is writing a new monograph on social inequality in digital media culture, entitled Workers Without Bodies: Towards a Theory of Race and Digital Labor.
Charles Kronengold, Department of Music, Stanford University
Puzzling Interfacing, Musical Thinking, and Multisensory Experience
March 4, 2013
Charles Kronengold has published on twentieth-century Western art music, popular music, urban film, and such philosophical subjects as composers' intentions, the roles of accidents in theory, and the relevance of African American music to current debates about the "post-secular". His current research concerns the ways that modern artistic genres condition, depict, embody and help to transform the activity of thinking. He is the author of the forthcoming Live Genres in Late Modernity and a book-in-progress, Different Methods, Different Signs: Crediting Thinking in Soul and Dance Music. He received his B.A. from Yale, his Ph.D. from UC San Diego, taught musicology and film theory at Wayne State and was recently a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell. He is Assistant Professor of Music at Stanford.
2012
Christine Acham, Department of African American and African Studies, University of California, Davis
Infiltrating Hollywood: The Rise and Fall of The Spook Who Sat by the Door
March 2, 2012
Christine Acham is an Associate Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis. She is the co-director with Clifford Ward of Infiltrating Hollywood: The Rise and Fall of the Spook Who Sat by the Door, a feature-length documentary about the controversial, FBI-repressed 1973 The Spook Who Sat by the Door. The Spook Who Sat by the Door is the film adaptation of Sam Greenlee's 1969 novel by the same name and is widely hailed as a cult classic and one of the most important underground black productions of the era. Acham is also the author of Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power (University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
Sianne Ngai, Department of English, Stanford
The Zany Science: Gender and Post-Fordist Performance
September 8, 2012
Sianne Ngai is Professor of English at Stanford University. She is the author of ugly Feelings (2007). Her new book, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, interesting, is forthcoming this fall from Harvard.
Dr. Ngai will participate in a roundtable discussion of Lars von Trier's "Melancholia" (2011), with Sianne Ngai (Department of English, Stanford), Jonathan Flatley, and Steven Shaviro; and give a lecture entitled "The Zany Science: Gender and Post-Fordist Performance."
Patricia MacCormack, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Angelic Monsters, Movement in Mucous" (co-sponsored by Turner Lecture Series)
October 24, 2012
Patricia MacCormack is a reader in english, communication, film and media at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She has published extensively on Guattari, Blanchot, Serres, Irigaray, queer theory, teratology, body modification, posthuman theory, animal rights and horror film. Her work includes "Inhuman Ectasy" (Angelaki), "Becoming-Vulca" (New Formations), "The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin" (Body and Society), "Necrosexuality" (Queering the Non/Human), "Unnatural Alliances" (Deleuze and Queer Theory), "Vitalistic FeminEthics" (Deleuze and Law), and "Cinemasochism: Time, Space and Submission" (The Afterimage of Gilles Deleuze's Film Philosophy). She is the author of Cinesexuality and the co-editor of The Schizoanalysis of Cinema. She is currently writing on post-human ethics. She has also worked as a consultant in a number of art projects on feminism and queer theory and has appeared interviewed and as commentator on many DVD extras.
Kara Keeling, School of Cinematic Arts and of African American Studies in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California
"Chapter One: Rewritten": Pumzi, Who Fears Death, and Speculations on "Africa"
November 2, 2012
Kara Keeling is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts and of African American Studies in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007). She coedited (with Josh Kun) a selection of writings about sound and American Studies entitled Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) and (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) a selection of writings by the late James A. Snead entitled European Pedigrees/African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Keeling also has written several articles that have appeared in the journals GLQ, Qui Parle, The Black Scholar, Women and Performance, and elsewhere.
Eileen Joy, Lead Ingenitor, BABEL Working Group/Director, Punctum Books
Pursuing a Fugitive, Vagabond, Promiscuous Post/medieval Studies
November 9, 2012
Eileen Joy is a specialist in Old English literary studies and cultural studies, with interests and publications in medieval literature, poetry and poetics, historiography, ethics, affects, embodiments, queer studies, the politics of friendship, speculative realism, and the post/human. She is the Co-Founder and Lead Ingenitor of the BABEL Working Group (babelworkinggroup.org), the Founder and Co-Editor of the award-winning journal "postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies"(palgrave-journals.com/pmed/index.html), Co-Founder and Co-Editor of "O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies" (ozone-journal.org), and the Co-Founder and Director of punctum books: spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion (punctumbooks.wordpress.com).
2011
Ian Bogost, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dark Horse: The Parimutuel Future of Procedural Rhetoric
January 21, 2011
Dr. Ian Bogost is an award-winning videogame designer and media philosopher. He is Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology (where is also Director of the Graduate Program in Digital Media) and Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC. His research and writing consider videogames as an expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on political games and artgames. Bogost is author or co-author of seven books, including Unit Operations, of Persuasive Games, Racing the Beam, Newsgames, and the forthcoming How To Do Things with Videogames and Alien Phenomenology. Bogost's videogames cover topics as varied as airport security, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited internationally. His most recent game, A Slow Year, a collection of fame poems for Atarim won the Vanguard and Virtuoso awards at the 1020 Indiecade Festival.
Michael Goddard, School of Arts and Media, University of Salford, United Kingdom
1977 as Nexcus: Toward a Media Ecology of a Year of Political and Media Evolution
September 6, 2011
Michael Goddard is a lecturer in media studies at the University of Salford. His current research centres on Polish and European cinema and visual culture and he is reviews editor of Studies in Eastern Europe Cinema (SEEC). He has just completed a book on the cinema of the Chilean-born filmmaker Raúl Ruiz. He has done research into Deleuze's aesthetic and film theories, which has resulted in a number of publications. He has also been doing research on the fringes of popular music focusing on groups such as The Fall, Throbbing Gristle and Laibach. Another strand of his research concerns Italian post-autonomist political thought and media theory, particularly the work of Franco Berardi (Bifo). He is now conducting a research project, Radical Ephemera, examining radical media ecologies in film, TV, radio and radical politics in the 1970s.
Vivian Sobchack, School of Theater, Film And Television UCLA
The Dream (Ol)Factory: On Making Scents of Cinema" (co-sponsored by Dennis Turner Memorial Lecture)
September 16, 2011
Vivian Sobchack was the first woman elected president of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and is on the board of directors of the American Film Institute. Her essays have appeared in journals such as "Quarterly Review of Film and Video", "Film Comment", "camera obscura", "Film Quarterly", and "Representations". Her books include Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film; The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience; and Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, and she has edited two anthologies: Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change; and The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event. Her research interests are eclectic: American film genres, philosophy and film theory, history and phenomenology of perception, historiography and cultural studies.
2010
Drew Daniel, Johns Hopkins University
Why be Something You're Not?
February 5, 2010
Drew Daniel lives in Baltimore, where he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University. Daniel is one half of the band Matmos, and all of the Soft Pink truth. He is the author of Twenty Jazz Funk Greats.
Kay Dickinson, Goldsmith College, University of London
Red and Green Stars in Broad Daylight: Syrian State Cinema's Journeys to Socialist Europe
March 25, 2010
Kay Dickinson teaches within the Media and Communications department of Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is currently developing a book-length study entitled Arab Cinema Travels, which grows out of previous research published in the journals Screen and Camera Obscura, as well as her co-edited anthology The Arab Avant-Garde (Wesleyan University Press, forthcoming). She is the author of Off Key: When Film and Music Won't Work Together (Oxford University Press, 2008) and the editor of Movie Music, The Film Reader (Routledge, 2002) and, with Glyn Davis, Teen TV (BFI, 2003).
John Rieder, University of Hawaii
Race and Revenge Fantasies in Avatar, District 9, and Inglorious Bastards
September 20, 2010
John Reider is Professor of English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he teaches courses on literary and cultural theory and on science fiction. He has published a book on William Wordsworth, Wordsworth's Counterrevolutionary Turn (University of Delaware Press, 1997), and articles on Wordsworth, the Shelleys, and the institutional history of the concept of Romanticism. More recently he has authored Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Wesleyan, 2008) and, in the last year, contributed to The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (Routledge, 2009), 50 Key Figures of Science Fiction (Routledge, 2009), Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (Pluto, 2009), and Science Fiction Studies (July 2010).
Heather Love, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania
The Stigma Archive (co-sponsored by the Women's Studies program)
October 21, 2010
Heather Love is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her areas of interest include gender studies and queer theory, the literature and culture of modernity, affect studies, film and visual culture, psychoanalysis, race and ethnicity, sociology and literature, and critical theory. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard, 2007) and the co-editor of a special issue of New Literary History ("Is There Life after Identity Politics?"). She is the editor of a special issue of GLQ ("Rethinking Sex", forthcoming later this fall) about the work of anthropologist Gayle Rubin and the feminist roots of queer theory. This year she is a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center working on a book on the source materials for Erving Goffman's 1963 book, Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity.
Jussi Parikka, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Media Archaeology as Zombie Media Research
October 25. 2010
Dr. Jussi Parikka is director of the Cultures of the Digital Economy (CoDE) Research Institute at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. He is also a reader in media theory and history, and the author of several articles and books including Digital Contagions (2007), and the forthcoming Insect Media (November 2010), as well as the co-edited volumes The Spam Book (2009) and Media Archaeologies (forthcoming 2011). He is currently working on a new book on media archaeology for Polity Press.
2009
Bruce Robbins, Columbia University
Chomsky and cosmopolitanism
January 23, 2009
Bruce Robbins is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Upward Mobility and the Common Good (Princeton UP, 2007), Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (NYU Press, 1999), Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (Verso, 1993), and The Servant's Hand: English Fiction From Below (Columbia UP, 1986).
Eugene Thacker, Georgia Institute of Technology
After Life
March 6, 2009
Eugene Thacker is the author of Biomedia (University of Minnesota, 2004), The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture (MIT, 2005) and co-author with Alexander Galloway of The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (University of Minnesota, 2007). He co-edits the book series "Anonymous Theory," and has previously collaborated with RSG (Radical Software Group), Biotech Hobbyist, and Fakeshop. Thacker is Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, & Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Tom Gunning, University of Chicago
Visible/Invisible: The Medium of Vision
March 27, 2009
Tom Gunning is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Professor in the Department of Art History and The Committee on Cinema and Media at the University of Chicago. He is the author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press) and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (British Film Institute), as well as over 100 articles on early cinema, film history and theory, avant-garde film, film genre, and cinema and modernism.
Charles Altieri, University of California, Berkeley
Why modernist claims for autonomy matter
April 10, 2009
Charles Altieri teaches in the English Department of the University of California, Berkeley. This privilege has allowed him to write several books, the most recent of which are The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetic of the Affects (Cornell UP, 2004) and The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Modernism and After (Blackwell, 2006). He is working on a book on Wallace Stevens and a sequel to The Particulars.
Jackie Stacey, author
The Cinematic Life of the Gene
April 13, 2009
As well as a being a co-editor of Screen and Feminist Theory, Stacey's publications include Star Gazing: Female Spectator's and Hollywood Cinema (1994) and Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (1997). She has further served as co-editor of Thinking Through the Skin with Sara Ahmed (2001), and Queer Screens with Sarah Street (2007). She is currently completing a new book for Duke University Press entitled The Cinematic Life of the Gene.
This talk is co-sponsored by the English Department, Film Studies, and Women's Studies.
Joshua Colover, University of California Davis
pointe de capital: poetics, political economy, catastrophe
September 11, 2009
Joshua Clover is a professor of poetry and poetics at the University of California Davis, with a sideline in Marxist economic theory. Books include the poetry collections Madonna anno domini and The Totality for Kids; a book on The Matrix for the British Film Institute's Film Classics series; and the cultural history, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About. He sits on the editorial board of Film Quarterly, where he writes a column called "Marx and Coca-Cola." His current work concerns "feelings of financialization" - a phenomenology of "fictitious capital" and life within its regime.
Daphne Brooks, English and African-American Studies, Princeton University
Bring the Pain: Post-Soul Memory, Neo-Soul Affect and Lauryn Hill in the Black Public Sphere
October 23, 2009
Daphne A. Brooks is an associate professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University where she teaches courses on African-American literature and culture, performance studies, critical gender studies, and popular music culture. She is the author of two books: Bodies in Dissent: Performing Race, Gender, and Nation in the Trans-Atlantic Imaginary (Duke UP, 2006), winner of the Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African-American Performance from ASTR, and Jeff Buckley's Grace The Great Escapes: The Narratives of William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, and William Craft, and The Performing Arts volume of The Black Experience in the Western Hemisphere Series. Brooks is currently also a contributing writer to The Nation where she has published articles on Beyonce and Amy Winehouse. She is currently working on a new book entitled Subterranean Blues: Black Feminist Musical Subcultures from the Minstrelsy to the Post-Hip Hop Era (Harvard UP, forthcoming).
2008
Beth Coleman, MIT
Hello Avatar!: Virtual communities and networked subjects
April 18, 2008
Dr. Beth Coleman is a professor in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Her research interests include virtual world design and use, networked subjectivity, global media emergence and practice in China, India and Africa, contemporary art and technology, and critical history of race and technology. For excerpts from her forthcoming book, Hello Avatar: A Virtual World Primer and other publications, see her website. She blogs on emergent media practices at projectgoodluck.com.
Andrew, Hoskins, University of Warwick
The mediatization of memory
September 16, 2008
Andrew Hoskins is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. He attained his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Sociology at Lancaster. His research focuses on the theoretical and empirical investigation of today's 'new media ecology' and the nature of and the challenges for individual, social, and cultural memory in this environment. He is founding Principal Editor of the international and interdisciplinary SAGE journal of Memory Studies (mss.sagepub.com) and Director of the Warwick Centre for Memory Studies. His latest book is Television and Terror: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse (with Ben O'Loughlin, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
2007
Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago
On the desire to be normal: Post-Fordist in La Promesse and Rosetta
February 16, 2007
Lauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Professor of English and Director of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project at the University of Chicago. She is author of The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997), and the forthcoming The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008). She has also edited a number of volumes, including Intimacy (2000), Our Monica, Ourselves (2001), Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion(2004), and the forthcoming On the Case (2007). This talk comes from her manuscript, "Cruel Optimism."
Madhu Dubey, University of Illinois at Chicago
Black to the past: Speculative fictions of slavery
March 30, 2007
Madhu Dubey is a Professor in the Departments of English and African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic (1994) and Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (1993).
Erik Davis, writer and independent scholar
Down the rabbit hole: Philip K. Dick and cybernetic Subjectivity
October 5, 2007
Erik Davis is a writer and independent scholar, and the author, most recently, of The Visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual Landscape. He also wrote the cult media studies classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Information Age, and a critical volume on Led Zeppelin's fourth album. A frequent speaker and teacher at universities and festivals alike, Davis has contributed articles and essays to scores of books and publications, including the recent volumes AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man and Everything You Know About God is Wrong. He posts regularly at techgnosis.com.
Brian Rotman, Ohio State University
Lettered selves and beyond
October 24, 2007
Brian Rotman is a Humanities Distinguished Professor at the Ohio State University in the Department of Comparative Studies. Articles and Reviews by him have appeared in the Guardian Newspaper, the Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books. He is the author of various stage plays, a play for radio, as well as six books, among which are Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero and Ad Infinitum...the Ghost in Turing's Machine from Stanford University Press, and forthcoming from Duke University Press, Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being.
Virtual Citizenship
New Technologies Symposium
November 30, 2007
The DeRoy Lecture Series is cosponsoring the Virtual Citizenship | New Technologies Symposium taking place in at the Bernath Auditorium at 9 AM November 30. The symposium is a joint effort of, in addition to the DeRoy Lecture Series, Wayne State's Center for the Study of Citizenship, its Office for Teaching and Learning, and it's honors program, to study the intersection between new information technologies and the practice of citizenship. The symposium will launch a broader research, teaching, and service project that can help us understand what citizenship means in the 21st century and how the notions of community membership and the exercise of power are affected by newly pervasive technologies such as (but certainly not limited to) text-messaging, Facebook, del.icio.us, and Second Life.
2006
Mark Amerika, author
A Discussion of Recent Work
March 3, 2006
Mark Amerika was recently named a "Time Magazine 100 Innovator" as part of their continuing series of features on the most influential artists, scientists, entertainers and philosophers into the 21st century, is the author of two novels: The Kafka Chronicles and Sexual Blood. He has also published two anthologies, Degenerative Prose: Writing Beyond Category [co-edited with Ron Sukenick] and In Memoriam to Postmodernism: Essays on the Avant-Pop [co-edited with Lance Olsen].
Mark Amerika was a Creative Writing Fellow and Lecturer on Network Publishing and Hypertext at Brown University where he developed the GRAMMATRON project, a multi-media narrative for network-distributed environments. In Spring 2000, GRAMMATRON was selected as one of the first works of Internet art to ever be exhibited in the prestigious Whitney Biennial of American Art.
Davide Grassi
DEMO-KINO: Virtual Biopolitical Agora" (an "anti-entertainment movie")
March 21, 2006
DemoKino is a virtual parliament that through topical film parables provides the voters (participants) with the opportunity to decide on issues that are, paradoxically, becoming the essence of modern politics: the questions of life. The project questions not only the utopia of contemporary virtual forum that is supposed to open ways for a more direct and influential participation but also points out a much deeper problem of modern democracy (virtual as well). With its reduced narrativeness--the story is built on the 'pro and contra' inner dialogues of the protagonist who is led around his home in a parliamentary kind of way by the 'voters,' based on their decisions--Demokino shows how these ethical dilemmas of modern life suddenly become the core of our political participation. When the issue of life enters the political arena and modern politics becomes biopolitics the democratic decision reaches an impasse: in the political arena laws are being debated on issues that can actually tolerate no decisions and any kind of majority rule is problematic in itself, any political regulation a publicly legitimated act of violence. Demokino is a virtual parliament that clearly displays how politics comes before law. Law is just a utopic and redundant technical procedure to cover the political essence.
Elizabeth Grosz, Women's and Gender Studies Department, Rutgers University
Vibrations
September 29, 2006
Elizabeth Grosz was born in Sydney, Australia and gained her B.A. (honors) and Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Department of General Philosophy, University of Sydney, where she taught as a lecturer and senior lecturer from 1978-1991. She moved to Monash University in Melbourne as Director of the newly formed the Institute of Critical and Cultural Studies in 1992, where she was Associate Professor and Professor in Critical Theory and Philosophy. She has been a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, University of California, Davis, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Richmond, George Washington University and the University of California, Irvine.
This lecture was co-sponsored by the Students' Association of Graduates in English and organized by graduate student Justin Prystash.
Jonathan Marks, University of North Carolina Charlotte
Why the Race to Racialize Medicine is Better Lost
October 12, 2006
Jonathan Marks is Professor of Anthropology at University of North Carolina Charlotte. He is the author of Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race and History (1995), What It Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes (2002), and Our Place in Nature: A Biological Anthropology (forthcoming), and of numerous articles on human genetics and evolution.
The talk was moderated by Professor Jacalyn Harden (Anthropology), with responses by Professors John Kamholz (Medical School), Marsha Richmond (Interdisciplinary Studies) and Steven Shaviro (English).
Julian Dibbell, author
PLAY MONEY: Gold Farms, Polar bear Rugs, and the Theory and Practice of Contemporary Ludocapitalism
November 10, 2006
Julian Dibbell has, in the course of over a decade of writing and publishing, established himself as one of digital culture's most thoughtful and accessible observers. He is the author of two books on virtual worlds, My Tiny Life (Henry Holt, 1999) and Play Money (Basic, 2006), and has written essays and articles on hackers, computer viruses, online communities, encryption technologies, music pirates, and the heady cultural, political, and philosophical questions that tie these and other digital-age phenomena together. Currently a contributing editor for Wired magazine, he lives in South Bend, Indiana.
David M. Halperin, University of Michigan
What do gay men want? Sex, risk and the subjective life of homosexuality
December 1, 2006
David M. Halperin is the W. H. Auden Collegiate Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality at the University of Michigan, where he teaches English, Women's Studies, Comparative Literature, and Classical Studies. He is the author or editor of eight books, including The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, Saint Foucault, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, and Gay Shame (forthcoming). With Carolyn Dinshaw he founded and edited GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
2005
Jodi Dean, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Neoliberal Fantasies
September 30, 2005
Jodi Dean is a Professor in the Department of Political Science of the Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is a noted feminist scholar and author of Aliens in America and Zizek's Politics.
Mark Anthony Neal, Duke University
The TNI Mix-Tape: Jay-Z
October 20, 2005
Mark Anthony Neal is an Associate Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Program in African and African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of four books, including New Black Man (2005) and is the co-editor (with Murray Forman) of That's the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader.