H. Grant Timms  

Email: granttimms@trentu.ca

Classes: CUST 2050Y

H. Grant Timms is a cultural historian, critical theorist, and community activist. He studied for six years at Trent, receiving his BA in Cultural Studies and History in 2001, and MA in Theory, Culture and Politics in 2004. He is currently finishing his doctoral work in Social and Political Thought at York University. In addition to maintaining a life-long fascination with mythology and religion, his research interests include contemporary philosophy (with a focus on Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard), political-economy, and the history of media and technology. His dissertation, “Deus Capital: an inquiry into relations of infinite debt” mounts a critique of theories of immanent causality and capitalist totalisation through an exploration of the function of debt and obligation in social organisation and its role in the creation of cultural meaning. The project includes a study of the late capitalist debt/money not only as a medium of exchange, commodity and store of value, but as sign, symbol, economic staple, and dominant medium of communication.

His conference presentations include the Deleuze International Conference at Trent in 2004, Congress at UWO in 2005, and the ISSEI conference in Malta in 2006 where he delivered a paper dealing with the concepts of the self and experience in Deleuze’s reading of Hume (“Subjectivity and the Synthetic a priori”). His most recent publication, “The Community Law School: a model for public legal education and civic engagement”, appears in “Research Communication in the Social and Human Sciences” (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008). The chapter was co-authored with colleagues from the Community Law School of Sarnia-Lambton (of which he is a founding member), a non-profit public legal education project that offers courses and workshops on social welfare law topics to marginalized and low-income citizen groups, and social service agencies (http://www.communitylawschool.org/).