All members of the community are invited to learn about “Humorlessness: Politics” during a dynamic free, public lecture delivered by American scholar Dr. Lauren Berlant, Trent University’s 2014 Elaine Stavro Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Theory, Politics and Gender, on Tuesday, October 14 at 7:30 p.m. in Bagnani Hall, Traill College (310 London Street).

The lecture is part of the new Trent Idea Exchange Lecture Series, a series of free public lectures designed to bring international experts to the Peterborough community to speak on the world’s most crucial and cutting-edge topics.

During her talk, Professor Berlant, the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago, will address the connections between humour, and the lack thereof, and political performance and aspiration. Prof. Berlant will present cases ranging from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers’ documentary Finally Got the News (1970), to the contemporary political art of Steve McQueen, William Pope.L, and Claire Pentecost.

The Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Theory, Politics & Gender was established by Dr. Elaine Stavro, professor of Political Studies at Trent University. The endowment, which brings a different scholar to Trent each year, is intended to provide students, staff, faculty and members of the community with access to an exceptional scholar who is engaged in political theory, and to significantly build on the University’s reputation for its interdisciplinary programs.

”As politics dominates so many aspects of our daily lives, and it is increasing troubling in our times, it is important to examine different ways of thinking that contribute to questioning existing political discourses,” Prof. Stavro said.

Prof. Berlant, a cultural studies theorist, writes and teaches on issues of intimacy and belonging in popular culture, in relation to the history and fantasy of citizenship. Over her career, she has generated a path-breaking body of scholarship that has opened up and reinvigorated interdisciplinary conversations about citizenship, sex, law and neoliberalism for over two decades.

Her national sentimentality trilogy—The Anatomy of National Fantasy (1991), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997), and The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008)—morphed into a quartet, with Cruel Optimism (2011), that addresses transnational precarious publics and the aesthetics of affective adjustment in the contemporary United States and Europe.

Her interest in affect, aesthetics, and politics is also expressed in the edited volumes Intimacy (2000), Compassion (2004), and On the Case (Critical Inquiry, 2007). Her most recent books are Desire/Love (2012) and, with Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (2014).

About Professor Elaine Stavro
Dr. Elaine Stavro is a professor at Trent University who has taught in the Politics, Women’s Studies and Philosophy Departments and in the Theory, Culture & Politics M.A. Program. Her primary areas of research are theoretical work, continental philosophy, feminist and gender theory, and the body politic in contemporary culture. She has completed a book on Simone de Beauvoir, entitled A Woman Becoming: The Political Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir. Some of her other publications and papers have focused on the topics of coalitional politics, the regulation of the family, and contemporary political discourses of the body.

Posted on Monday, May 26, 2014.