Upcoming Events and Lectures
Friday, October 9, 2020 - 4:00pm
Online Seminar
Third-World Refugees, Rights, and West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s
During the 1970s and 80s, thousands of refugees from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia began seeking asylum in West Germany each year. Banned from working and often forced to live in camps, these so-called “Third-World” refugees... Read More »
Monday, October 12, 2020 - 7:00pm
Montaigne was a great explorer of the self. Living in a challenging time – France was ravaged by the wars of religion – he made himself the object of his studies and, in doing so, created one of the great works of western literature: The Essays. We will examine a short excerpt from his essay "On... Read More »
Thursday, October 15, 2020 - 8:00pm
“Schelling and Speculative Literary Criticism”
*This lecture and Q&A will be held remotely on Zoom. There will be a Zoom invitation sent on the day of the event.
Friday, October 23, 2020 - 4:00pm
Online Seminar
The Time of the Antechamber: A History of Waiting,1500–1800
While exploring the epistemological difficulties in studying time, the philosopher Henri Bergson cautioned his readers in 1888 that, “We necessarily express ourselves by means of words and we usually think in terms of space.” This... Read More »
Monday, October 26, 2020 - 7:00pm
This session will explore the themes of violence, aggression, and human nature through the lens of Sigmund Freud’s classic text, Civilization and its Discontents (1930). The session will introduce some crucial tenets of Freud’s psychological theories while also exploring broader debates on the... Read More »
Thursday, November 5, 2020 - 8:00pm
“The Glance of the Basilisk: Gender and Poetic Looking in Droste-Hülshoff”
*This lecture and Q&A will be held remotely on Zoom. There will be a Zoom invitation sent on the day of the event.
Monday, November 9, 2020 - 7:00pm
Tact is often considered a quaint little virtue: nice to have, commendable but not required. Yet over the past century, philosophers thought about tact as crucial when humanity was threatened by war, pernicious ideologies, or violence in the bloody aftermath of revolutions. So what is the place of... Read More »
Friday, November 13, 2020 - 2:00pm
Online Seminar
Nineteenth Century Science Goes Global
During the latter half of the 19th century, international scientific collaborations of unprecedented scale, expense, and degree of organization were initiated in both the human and natural sciences. This is also the moment when the first international... Read More »
Friday, November 20, 2020 - 2:00pm
Online Seminar
Post-Colonialism, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust: The Achille Mbembe Case in Germany
This spring has witnessed heated debate in Germany about the campaign to disinvite Achille Mbembe, the South African-based Cameroonian theorist, as the keynote speaker at a music festival. In late March, some... Read More »
Friday, December 4, 2020 - 4:00pm
Online Seminar
The Sociology of Empire: German and Habsburg Theories of Multinational Statehood, 1848-1914
Over the past twenty years, historians have dramatically reevaluated the Habsburg Monarchy. Whereas scholars once characterized the Monarchy as a “prison of nations,” they now emphasize the effectiveness of... Read More »