Previous Speakers
2018 - 2019 Academic Year
Jessica Becking
The Ecology of Language and the Language of Place: Language as Environmental Response in the Era of the Anthropocene
As humans, language is one of the most precious things we have. Language holds inside of itself all the things we hold dearest: memory, emotion, perception, experience, communication – life. Having the capacity for language is also what marks us out as unique, special, separate – exceptional, and it can serve to perpetuate the belief that we live outside of our environment: an audience member and not a player. This belief renders our attempts at conservation problematic. Conservation requires a protocol of action (or inaction) in relation to the world around us and, simply by virtue of our thinking that we can enact some kind of preservation of the natural world, automatically positions us as existing outside of, and exceptional to, our ecosystem.
In the era of the Anthropocene, language, particularly language for the land, is rapidly disappearing. Language also, arguably, comes to establish itself as an essential environmental response. As our least invasive means of conservation, language allows us to protect the land and nature, through our awareness of its existence, its biodiversity, the ways in which it changes over time and it furnishes us with the ability to share our experiences with others. This can only be achieved through the active use of language and naming and the pursuance of an active and persistent experiential engagement with the natural world around us. In this way, we will begin to see our place, our right here. As we adopt a parochial approach, and attune ourselves to the local distinctiveness, we will rediscover our place and our own place within it.
What is an appropriate response to the land in the face of the all-consuming Anthropocene? This seminar will attempt to provide a response.
Kelly Egan
Assistant Professor
How To Write a Successful Eulogy, Or, Re-Imagining Film After Its Death
The “death of film” has been a trope in recent scholarship in the field of film studies. This trope has flirted with apocalyptic rhetoric—like all other “death of…” media discourses (i.e., the death of the book, the death of television, the death of industrial/manual labour in developed nations)—pronouncing with nostalgia and sentimentality the collapse of “the world as we know it.” Within this rhetoric, the discourse of authenticity is often used to reify and edify the past, suggesting that there is something more “real” and “authentic” in that which has been “lost,” suggesting that celluloid-based cinema produces an inherently “true experience” that digital media is incapable of reproducing. While the language of this transition may seem extremist, there is no doubt that the shift from the celluloid-based filmic experience to digital cinema will have repercussions, specifically insofar as the modes of producing, recollecting and perceiving cinematic space through each medium differs based on the respective materiality they engender. Rather than focusing on the negative, polarizing and extremist rhetoric, this seminar will instead consider the material possibilities of analogue film after its commercial obsolescence. What can be found, freed or reimagined once a technology has been declared dead? Throughout this seminar, we will pursue this question by looking at my own body of work, as an artist who emerged only after film was already “dead.”
Ewa Plonowska Ziarek
Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature at The State University of New York at Buffalo
The Promise of Democratic Politics in Laclau’s Populism and Arendt’s Political Action
Brent Bellamy
Assistant Professor (LTA)
Materialism and the Critique of Energy
This seminar focuses on reading science fiction insofar as it pertains to ecology and environment. Beginning with the science-fictional process of world building, the seminar will investigate the contested narratives that surround human use and abuse of technology. It will look to marginalized voices in science-fiction writing and subgenres of science fiction itself. This exploration of the Anthropocene, ecology, and energy will take up science fiction’s capacity to imagine massive interrelated systems, to depict incredible timescales, and to comment on the politics of the human impacts on such systems and across such durations. This talk will feature classic science-fiction texts and emergent works.
Liam Mitchell
Associate Professor, Chair of the Department of Cultural Studies and the Coordinator of the Media Studies program
Ludopolitics: Videogames against Control
What can videogames tell us about the politics of contemporary technoculture, and how are designers and players responding to its impositions? To what extent do the technical and aesthetic features of videogames index our assumptions about the world and the social configuration they entail? And how can we use games to identify and shift those assumptions and configurations? In this talk, I respond to these questions by presenting some of the central arguments of my book, Ludopolitics: Videogames against Control – that videogames promise players the opportunity to map and master worlds; that they offer closed systems that are perfect and perfectible, in principle if not in practice; and that although they provide players with a means of escape from a world that can be unpredictable and unjust, they aren’t only escapism. Designers and players alike routinely engage in immanent, experimental, and effective critiques of the fantasy of control, and in this talk, I present a few of their playful results.
Michael Morse
Music Director, Traill College
Musical Discourse and the History of Ideas
With the rise of the notion of discourse, the history of ideas has gained a new means to formulate its questions. Like “paradigm,” “discourse” is a model that inherently conceives the order of things in equally particular and connected ways, historically. Unlike events, things, or people, ideas cannot be understood in isolation, nor studied in this way without serious distortions. Save alas for some fashionable, superficial, and pointlessly literal invocations of Michel Foucault, however, the discursive conception has yet to find its way into the consideration of non-verbal discourses, such as visual art and music; equally important, the intelligences of these discursive forms have yet to inform the history of ideas. The present essay argues for the discursive particularity of musical ideas, and its potential contributions to intellectual history.
Samples of Michael’s music can be heard at https://soundcloud.com/michael-morse-4
Katrina Keefer
Adjunct Professor, Trent University
Reconstructing Links from within Shackles: Using Scarification and Tattoo to Uncover Origins in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
Spanning centuries, the trans-Atlantic slave trade forcibly exported 12.5 million Africans who were loaded aboard vessels bound for the Americas and for Europe. These men, women and children were renamed, separated from one another, and dispersed through a variety of plantation societies. A symbol of African origins which lingered upon faces and bodies was permanent body marking; never imported as a tradition into the Americas, the patterns which were applied by communities upon individuals held complex and nuanced meanings. Identities, origins, kin groups and personal achievements were all represented by varying patterns among various peoples. By using these marks, which were often described in the Americas as ‘country marks’ upon African-born slaves, modern scholars can begin to trace regional origins inscribed upon those who survived the Middle Passage. Major digital initiatives concerning enslaved origins analyze the recorded African names of slaves in the documents which preserve them, but these projects must contend with a variety of methodological issues in their ethnolinguistic approach. This paper describes and considers a complementary approach to identity which relies upon the identification of scarification and tattoos upon faces and bodies. Manumission records, ethnographic accounts, and runaway ads provide rich and often carefully drawn evidence of specific patterns which can be cross-referenced against a catalogue of known patterns. While this latter database is in its early stages, the approach is one which holds rich potential. Identities etched into the skin may prove the most precise record of men, women and children whose historical record was often obscured.
Joe Yang
Cultural Studies PhD Student
The Endless Everyday: How people fight and nourish apocalyptic thought
On July 6 2018 the former leader of doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo was executed by hanging. Aum Shinrikyo was responsible for releasing impure sarin gas on the Tokyo subway, leading to the deaths of 13 individuals and over a thousand injuries. As a response to the incident, sociologist Shinji Miyadai wrote the book Owarinaki Nichijo o ikiro! Oum kanzen kokufuku manyuaru (translated as “Living an endless everyday! A manual on how to defeat Aum”), where Shinji discusses the concept of everydayness. In this talk, I want to discuss how apocalypticism depends on a particular sense of everydayness. Drawing off the work of Frank Kermode, Ian Reader, and Benjamin Zeller, I look at how doomsday cults like Aum Shinrikyo and Heaven’s Gate understood the everyday and how they actively incorporated everydayness to legitimize group catastrophization. I also look at how everydayness as both a quasi-practice and an idea persists outside of organized doomsday cults, mainly in popular media. Specifically, I look at the Fukushima-Daiichi disaster, arguing that everydayness is not unique to cults, but rather is ingrained in general apocalyptic thought.
Hanjo Berressem
University of Cologne
Economies of Greed in Late Pynchon: America and the Logic of Capital
This talk reads Pynchon’s late work Bleeding Edge as a dark allegory of the logic of infinite greed and entitlement that pervades 20th century America. In the light of Pynchon’s allegorical anger about how America has dealt with 9/11, this talk revisits the early assessment of Pynchon’s works as Jeremiads.
Nadine Boljkovac
Falmouth University
[Non]Style is Feeling: Direct Tenderness from Sirk and Fassbinder to Haynes
Style, or nonstyle as Gilles Deleuze suggests, exposes the foreign within the familiar. Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes reveal characters-cum-prisoners trapped within ‘normativity.’ At the same time, their films envision alternative trajectories for the women effecting lasting reverberations, a feelingof events for the characters and us.
2017-18 Academic Year
Victoria de Zwaan
Professor, Cultural Studies Trent University
March 22, 2018, 7:30PM
Snow White-ness: Fairy-Tales, Adaptation, Metafiction
Liam Young
Faculty, School of Journalism & Communication, Carleton University
March 15, 2018, 7:30PM
On Lists, Salt, Beavers and the Pursuit of Paradigms in Media Theory
Rosemary Hennessy
L.H. Favrot Professor of Humanities and professor of English, Rice University, Houston, Texas
February 8, 2018, 7:30PM
Intimate Environments: Considering the Muriel Rukeyser Archive
Presented by The Annual Elaine Stavro Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Theory, Politics & Gender
Suzanne Bailey
Professor, English, Director, M.A. English Literature (Public Texts)
January 18, 2018, 7:30PM
From 'Beer Street' to the 'Apocalypse': Intaglio Printmaking as New (Old) Media
Dr. David Fancy
Associate professor of the Department of Dramatic Arts at Brock University
November 23, 2017, 7:30PM
‘I Scream the Body Electric’: Performance, Zombies, and Emergent Societies of Entrainment
Brent Ryan Bellamy
Canada Research Chair Postdoctoral Fellow in Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta
October 19, 2017, 7:30PM
The Post-Apocalyptic Mode in the Age of US Decline
James Penney
Department of Cultural Studies and Department of French and Francophone Studies
October 5, 2017, 7:30PM
Strangers on a Train: Genet and the Liquidity of Being
2016-17 Academic Year
Diane Coole
Professor of Political and Social Theory, Birkbeck University of London
November 17, 2016
Dirt: A New Materialist Approach
Presented by The Annual Elaine Stavro Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Theory, Politics & Gender
2014-15 Academic Year
International Conference on Critical Topography
Investigations of Landscapes
Critical Topography Research Group Trent University and Documentary Media Research Centre Ryerson University
May 20 - 22, 2015
Jonathan Bordo
Director, Cultural Studies Doctoral Program at Trent University
“Cezanne in the Mystic North (Thoughts on Imitation Today)”
Thursday, April 16, 2015, 7PM at the Peterborough Art Gallery
David Holdsworth
Director, MA Program in Theory, Culture and Politics at Trent University
“Matheme and Poem: Mediations between Badiou and Deleuze”
Monday, April 6, 2015, 10AM
Dr. Golfo Maggini
School of Philosophy
University of Ioannina, Greece
Tuesday, March 24, 2015, 5:00 p.m.
"The Phenomenology of Politics"
Sponsored by Theory, Culture and Politics, the Philosophy Department and University Seminars Program of the Onassis Foundation (USA)
Blake Fitzpatrick
Professor of Documentary Media
Ryerson University
"Freedom Rocks: the wall as image, art, paint and dust " A Visual Lecture
Thursday, March 19, 2015, 7:30PM
Jonathan Crago
Editor-in-chief McGill-Queen's University Press
Academic Publishing in a Digital Environment
Thursday, March 5, 2015, 2:00 p.m.
Dr. Margrit Shildrick
Linkoeping University, Sweden
Thursday, February 12, 7:30 pm
'Why should our Bodies end at the Skin?: Technologies, Boundaries and Embodiment
presented by the Cultural Studies Ph.D. Program and the Centre for Theory, Culture and Politics.
Dr. Ramin Jahanbegloo
Public Talk and Book Launch
Cultural Studies Doctoral Program with University of Regina Press
October 02, 2014 : 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Laura Thursby
Doctoral Candidate, Cultural Studies Program, Trent
Thursday, September 18, 2014
"Ethnic and Extraterrestrial Invaders"
Dr. Konstantin Butz
Academy of Media Arts, Cologne.
Tuesday, Sept 9, 2014
"Safety Pins and Swimming Pools: Skateboarding and Punkrock in 1980s California"
2013-14 Academic Year
Hanjo Berressem
March 13, 2014
Professor of American Studies
University of Cologne
"Lightning and Philosophy"
Jacques Rancière
September 30, 2013
Stavro Speaker (Market Hall)
Professor emeritus at the Université de Paris (St Denis) and faculty member at the European Graduate School
"The Politics of Fiction"
2012-13 Academic Year
Scott Henderson
February 28, 2013
Communication and Media Studies, Brock University
"Neo-Liberalist Subjectivity: Immediacy and Identity in the Digital Age"
Marc Shell
Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of English and American Literature and Language
Harvard University
"Hamlet’s Globe"
Thursday, January 24, 2013, 7:30 p.m.
Shannon Winnubst
November 29, 2012
Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Ohio State University
"Politics or Ethics? Reconsidering Queer Critiques of Normativity in Neoliberalism"
(A Politically Queer/Queerly Political Event)
Juliet Steyn
November 1, 2012
School of Arts, City University, London UK
"The Experience of Art in the Age of the Service Economy"
Emily Beausoleil
October 11, 2012
Post Doctoral Fellow, Cultural Studies, Trent University
'Identity, Agency, and the Dancing Body Politic"
Phillippa Levine
September 27, 2012
Department of History, University of Texas at Austin
Stavro Speaker (Market Hall)
Jodi Dean
Professor of Political Science Hobart and William Smith Colleges
"The Communist Horizon"
Thursday, September 20, 2012, 7:30PM
Speakers Series 2011-2012
David Pettigrew
Philosophy Department Southern Connecticut State University
"The Geography of Genocide in Eastern Bosnia"
Thursday, March 29, 2012, 7:30 p.m.
Randy Innes
Post Doctoral Fellow
“The Rhythm of the Image: Time, the Artwork and Visual Culture”
Thursday, March 8, 2012, 7:30 p.m. Scott House 105
Ian Balfour
March 1, 2012
Department of English, York University
"The Sublime Is Now (And Again): Theory, History, Examples"
Davide Panagia
Canada Research Chair, Professor of Cultural Studies, Trent University
"10 Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics"
Thursday, February 9, 2012, 7:30 p.m.
Courtney Berger
(Duke Univ. Press)
Professional Workshop
Wednesday February 1, 2012
CUST 6200 (all welcome)
6:00 p.m. Scott House 105
Alan Shapiro
January 26, 2012
Independent scholar based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany
"Media theory: beyond the dualities of form and content, critical and enthusiastic, real and fake"
Caroline Langill
Associate Dean, Faculty of Art
December 1 , 2011
Ontario College of Art and Design
"The Living Effect: Interrogating "aliveness" in historical and contemporary art "
Christopher Smith
Postdoctoral Fellow Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
"The Intoxication of Narcotic Modernity: Addiction, The Body, and The City"
Thursday, November 24, 2011 7:30 p.m. Scott House 105
W. J. T. Mitchell
Professor of English and Art History University of Chicago
"Seeing Madness: Insanity, Media, and Visual Culture"
Thursday, November 17, 2011 7:30 p.m.
Mikko Tuhkanen
Professor of English
November 3, 2011
Texas A&M University
"The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani"
A Politically Queer/Queerly Political Event
Eric Cazdyn
Centre for Comparative Literature and the Department of East Asian Studies
University of Toronto
October 6, 2011
"Crisis, Disaster, Revolution: Re-Theorizing and Re-Politicizing the Image."
Speakers Series 2010-2011
March 24, 2011
Emilia Angelova
Department of Philosophy, Trent University
"Signifying Negativity: Kristeva on Poetic Language and the Subject-in-process"
March 3, 2011
Barbara Havercroft
Department of French, University of Toronto
"Unspeakable" Wounds: Personal Trauma in Contemporary Women's Autobiographical Writings"
David Lubin
Frederick Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy, Georgetown University Law Center
"Amnesty, Amnesia, and Lae: A Reading of Dorfman's Death and the Maiden"
Thursday, January 20, 2011, 7:30 p.m.
Dorothea Olkowski
December 2, 2010, 7:30 p.m.
Dorothea Olkowski, "Gilles Deleuze's "Wrenching Duality": From Kantian Aesthetics to the Paintings of Francis Bacon
November 25, 2010
Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English
Wayne State University
"Even now, I'm not ashamed of my communist past": Some Revisionary Thoughts on Eastern European Film"
Jason Lafountain
Harvard Art History ABD
will visit CUST 6200 and Professor Bordo's thesis writing group.
November 24, 2010 at 3:00 P.M.
Baudelaire Live!
Thursday 11 Nov 2010, 9pm at the Trend
An open mic for performances from the work of the French poet. In French, in translation, with music. With a performance by Credo 4 and music by DJ Fever. Bohemian dress encouraged.
Sponsored by Trail College, the Graduate Students' Association and PhD Program in Cultural Studies.
October 21, 2010
Brian Massumi
Communication, Université de Montréal
"Politics Strikes: Decision's Creative Undoing"
A Politically Queer/Queerly Political Event
George Marcus
University of California, Irvine
"What Did Cultural Studies Do To Anthropological Ethnography? From Baroque Textual Aesthetics Back to The Design of the Scenes of Inquiry"
Thursday, October 14, 2010, 7:30 p.m.
Speakers Series 2009-2010
Timothy Murray
Director, Society for the Humanities, and Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell University.
"Immaterial Archives @ New Media Art”
Thursday, March 11, 2010, 7:30 p.m.
March 4, 2010
Frances Restuccia
English, Boston College
A Politically Queer/Queerly Political Event
Tanya Richardson
Assistant Professor, Anthropology Wilfrid Laurier University
“Objectifying Odessa.”
(Co-sponsored by the Theory, Culture and Politics Centre)
Thursday, February 4, 2010, 7:30 p.m.
Brian Rotman
Professor, Dept. of Comparative Studies Ohio State University
"Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being"
Thursday, January 28, 2010, 7:30 p.m.
November 26, 2009
Ellen Waterman
Fine Arts and Music, Guelph University
"Naked Intimacy: Improvisation, Eroticism, and Gender"
Presentations take place on Thursday evenings at 7:30 pm Traill College - Scott House 105
Alison Hearn
Associate Professor, Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario
"Self, commodity, promotion and politics: reality television, web 2.0 and the 'new' economy."
(Co-sponsored by the Theory, Culture and Politics Centre)
Thursday, November 12, 2009, 7:30 p.m. Scott House 105
Agnes Heller
Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York. Also Professor, ELTE.
“Autonomy of Art or the Dignity of the Work of Art.”
Friday, November 6, 2009, 12:30 p.m.
October 15, 2009
Peter Van Wyck
Communication, Concordia University
"At work on the Highway of the Atom"
A Critical Topographies Event
Speakers Series 2008-2009
October 16, 2008
Hans-Georg Moeller
Department of Philosophy, Brock University
"From Necessity to Contingency: Niklas Luhmann's Carnivalization of Philosophy"
November 6, 2008
Jasbir Puar
Department of Women's and Gender Studies, and graduate faculty in the Department of Geography, Rutgers University
"Prognosis Time: Pathologies of Terror"
(The Politically Queer/Queerly Political Series)
Novmeber 20, 2008
Feyzi Baban
Department of Politics, Trent University
"Multiple Modernities and the Headscarf Affair in Turkey and France"
January 15, 2009
Charles Shepherdson
Department of English, SUNY Albany
"Rethinking Pity and Fear in Tragic Catharsis: The Place of Emotion between Ethics and Esthetics "
February 12, 2009
Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon
University of Toronto
"Benjamin Britten's Late Style"
March 5, 2009
Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands
CRC in Culture and Sustainability
Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University
"Acts of Nature: Literature and the Green Public Sphere"
March 12, 2009
Neville Hoad
Department of English Studies, Center for Asian American Studies, Center for Women's and Gender Studies, University of Texas at Austin
"Transnational Sexuality Studies Then and Now"
(The Politically Queer/Queerly Political Series)
Speakers Series 2007-2008
October 11, 2007
John Drabinski
Department of Philosophy, Hampshire College
"Godard's Cinematic Empiricism"
Monday, October 15, 2007
Marc Shell
Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of English, Harvard University
"Talking the Walk and Walking the Talk: Moses and Marilyn Monroe"
Co-sponsored by TCP and the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Native Studies
November 5-8, 2007
Nancy Fraser
Departments of Philosophy and Politics, New School for Social Research
The Ryle Lectures, sponsored by the Department of Philosophy
Novmeber 15, 2007
Michael Lucey
Departments of French and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley
"Simone de Beauvoir and Sexuality in the Third Person"
Politically Queer/Queerly Political
November 29, 2007
Ihor Junyk
Cultural Studies Program, Trent University
"Erroneous Representations": Trauma, Nostalgia, and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine
January 24, 2008
Erin Manning
Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and Studio Arts, Concordia University
"Constituting Facts - or, Dorothy Napangardi Dances the Dreaming"
February 28, 2008
Charmaine Eddy
Department of English, Trent University
"Coetzee and the Scene of Writing: The Psycho-Landscape of Race in Disgrace"
Speakers Series 2006-2007
September 14, 2006
Kenneth Reinhard
English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles
“Political Theology and Love: Paul, Lacan, Badiou”
Co-sponsored by TCP, the Cultural Studies Program and the Department of Philosophy
October 5, 2006
Gary Genosko
Canada Research Chair in Technoculture Studies, Lakehead University
“Canadian Cultural Theory since the 70s -- Editorial Assemblages and Splinter Groups”
Co-sponsored by TCP and the Cultural Studies Program
(Cultural Studies in Canada Speakers’ Series)
October 19, 2006
Frances Ferguson
Department of English, Johns Hopkins University
“Education and Liberalism: What Children Taught Political Philosophy.”
November 9, 2006
Andra McCartney
Communication Studies, Concordia University
"In and Out of the Sound Studio: gender and sound technologies in Canada"
Co-sponsored by TCP and the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Native Studies
November 23, 2006
David Holdsworth
Environmental Studies, Trent University
“(Inter)disciplinary Practice at the End of Modernity: Reading Heidegger through the Italian Post-structuralists”
January 25, 2007
Imre Szeman
Globalization and Cultural Studies, McMaster University
(Cultural Studies in Canada Speakers’ Series)
February 8, 2007
Jodi Dean
Political Science, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
"Popular Credibility: 9/11 Conspiracy Theories and Certain Knowledge"
March 1, 2007
Douglas Torgerson
Cultural Studies Program, Trent University
“Misdirection in the Mystery: The Case of Chandler’s Hammett”
March 15, 2007
Richard Fung
Faculty of Art, Ontario College of Art and Design
"Continental Drift: The Imaging of AIDS"
(The Politically Queer/Queerly Political Series)
March 22, 2007
Arthur Kroker, CRC in Technology, Culture & Theory
University of Victoria
"Born Again Ideology"
(Cultural Studies in Canada Speakers’ Series)
March 26-29, 2007 - The Ryle Lectures
Simon Blackburn, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
“Pragmatism, Minimalism, and Common-Sense”
Speakers Series 2005-2006
October 13, 2005
Tim Dean , Literary & Cultural Theory, SUNY Buffalo
"Breeding Culture: Barebacking, Bugchasing, Gift-giving"
(The Politically Queer/Queerly Political Series)
November 3, 2005
Evelyn Fox Keller, Program in Science, Technology and Society,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"Evolving Function, Purpose, and Agency"
This is the last of four talks presented by Professor Keller as part of this year's Ryle Lectures.
Lady Eaton College Lecture Hall (ECC 201) 8:00 p.m.
December 1 , 2005
Bonnie Honig, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University
"The Time of Rights: Emergent Thoughts in an Emergency Setting"
January 26, 2006
James Penney, Cultural Studies Program, Trent University
"Loving the 'terrorist': Genet among the Palestinians"
February 9, 2006
Chris Hables Gray, Interdisciplinary Studies, Graduate College ,
The Union Institute and University; Interdisciplinary Studies, Goddard College
"Information, Culture, Politics"
March 2, 2006
Morton Schoolman, Department of Political Science, SUNY Albany
"Another Enlightenment? Rethinking Mass Culture"
March 9, 2006
Elizabeth Harvey, Department of English, University of Toronto
"Of Sex and Souls"
(The Politically Queer/Queerly Political Series)
Speakers Series 2004-2005
September 16, 2004
Paul Jones, University of New South Wales, Australia
“Raymond Williams’ Last Keyword: ‘Modern’”
September 30, 2004
Richard Rambuss, Emory Emory
“The Passion of the Magdalene”
November 3, 2004
Andrew Jamison
“The Making of Green Knowledge”
November 4, 2004
Susan Fast, School of Art, Drama and Music, McMaster University
Ellen Waterman, School of Fine Art and Music, University of Guelph
Veronica Hollinger, Department of Cultural Studies, Trent University
"Performance Anxiety"
November 25, 2004
Catriona Sandilands, Canada Research Chair, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University
“Where the mountain men meet the Lesbian rangers: Gender, nation and nature in Canada’s Rocky Mountain parks”
January 13, 2005
Film: Tommy: A Family Portrait and Panel Discussion
Joint Session with Frost Centre
March 3, 2005
Jodie Medd, Carleton University
“Queer (Modernist) Temporalities”
Speakers Series 2003-2004
September 18, 2003
Jocelyn Létourneau, Départment d’histoire et CELAT, Université Laval
“Remembering the Past: An Examination of Young Québecois’ History Memory”
October 30, 2003
Davide Panagia, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria University in the University of Toronto
“The Beautiful and the Sublime in Contemporary Political Argument”
November 13, 2003
Rebecca Kukla, Department of Philosophy, Georgetown and Johns Hopkins (on leave from Carleton)
“Mass Hysteria: The Uterus as Public Theatre”
November 20, 2003
Terry Goldie, Department of English, York University
"The Queer Zeitgeist and the Canadian Experience".
January 15, 2004
Zsuzsa Baross, Cultural Studies Program, Trent University
“’Remember to remember the future’…”
February 26, 2004
Andrew Wernick, Cultural Studies Program, Trent University
"Is Nothing Sacred? Reflections on a Berlin Monument”
March 4, 2004
David Holdsworth, ERS, Trent University
“Ideology, Discursive Formation, and the 'Science Problem' in Post-Marxist Thought”
March 15-18 - The Ryle Lectures
Iris Marion Young, University of Chicago, Ryle Lecturer
“Political Responsibility and Structural Injustice”
Speakers Series 2002-2003
September 27, 2002
W.J.T. (Tom) Mitchell, English and Art History, University of Chicago
'Country Matters: How Landscapes Talk Back'
Speaker in "Critical Topographies"
November 21, 2002
Keith Nurse, University of the West Indies
'Globalization, Carnival and the Black Atlantic'
Speaker in Crossing Borders Project
January 16, 2003
Danielle Egan, Department of Sociology, St. Lawrence University
'Irigaray Makes Me Sex: Nude Female Bodies and Suburban Mimesis'
Speaker in Crossing Borders Project
February 6, 2003
Margaret Olin,
'Touching Photographs'
Speaker in "Critical Topographies"
Speakers Series 2001-2002
October 18, 2001
Peter Schwenger, English, Mount St.Vincent's University
The Dream Narratives of Debris
November 8, 2001
Michael Dorland, Journalism, Carleton University
'Cherchez le juif': French Antisemitism, the Shoah, and French Psychoanalysis
January 24, 2002
Nicola Nixon, Concordia University and Harvard University
"Between Money and Meaning in Poe's 'The Purloined Letter'"
March 14, 2002
Anne Cvetkovich, Department of English, University of Texas
"Remembering AIDS Activism: Mourning and Militancy Revisited"
(part of the Politically Queer/Queerly Political series)
Speakers Series 2000-2001
September 28, 2000
Michael Titlestad, English and African Studies, University of South Africa (Pretoria)
“Contesting Maps: Musical Improvisation and Narrative”
PRC Lecture Hall 7:30 p.m.
October 5, 2000
Mark Jordan, Religious Studies, Emory University
“The Subculture Wars: Notes on the Wish for ‘Gay History’”
(Part of the Politically Queer/Queerly Political Series)
PRC Lecture Hall 7:30 p.m.
November 6, 2000
Mitchell Morris, Department of Musicology, UCLA
“Black masculinity and the sound of wealth: Barry White, the early 70s and the rise of disco”
PRC Lecture Hall 7:30 p.m.
November 23, 2000
Zsuzsa Baross, Cultural Studies, Trent University
“The Image as Witness, according to Godard”
PRC Lecture Hall 7:30 p.m.
November 30, 2000
Mark Kingwell, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto
“Tables, Chairs, and Other Machines for Thinking”
PRC Lecture Hall 7:30 p.m.
January 11, 2001
Derrick de Kerckhove, McLuhan Program, University of Toronto
“Literacy and Cognigion in Networks”
PRC Lecture Hall 7:30 p.m.
February 13, 2001
Elaine Stavro, Political Studies, Trent University
'Communitarian Discourse and New Labour: Privileging the Nuclear Family'
PRC Lecture Hall 7:30 p.m.
March 7, 2001
Special Seminar with Gerald A. Cohen, Ryle Lecturer
Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, Oxford University
“Why Not Socialism?”
PRC Senior Common Room
March 8, 2001
Elizabeth Povinelli, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago
“The Subject of Risk: The Social Orderings of Sexuality and Psychoanalysis”
Part of the Politically Queer/Queerly Political Series
PRC Lecture Hall 7:30 p.m.
Speakers Series 1999-2000
Thursday, September 30, 1999
Vicki Patraka
(Director, Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, Bowling Green State University)
"Spectacular Suffering: Performing Presence, Absence and Witness at U.S. Holocaust Museums"
PRC Lecture Hall 7:30 p.m.
Thursday, October 14, 1999
Kathryn Bond Stockton
(Director of Graduate Studies in English at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City)
"Cloth Wounds: Saint Genet Among the Lesbians"
This lecture is part of the "Politically Queer/Queerly Political" series
PRC Lecture Hall 7:30 p.m.
Wednesday, October 20, 1999
Mark Cheetham, Visual Arts, University of Western Ontario
"Plasmatics: Kant's 'Roman Period' and the Politics of Reception"
PRC Dining Hall 8:00 p.m.
Thursday, October 21, 1999
Robert Latham, English, University of Iowa
"The Cybernetic Vampire of Consumer Youth Culture"
PRC Lecture Hall, 7:30 p.m.
Thursday, November 18, 1999
Gad Horowitz, Political Science, University of Toronto
"Techniques of the Self -- With a Look Back at the General Semantics Movement"
PRC Lecture Hall, 7:30 p.m.
Thursday, November 25, 1999
Phillip Blond, Religious Studies, University of Exeter
"Thomas Aquinas' Refutation of Nominalism (or, Why only Theologians Care about Appearances)"
Thursday, January 27, 2000
Shannon Bell, Political Science, York University
"Speed Politics: Fast Feminism"
Thursday, March 9, 2000
James Ellis, English, University of Calgary
"The Erotics of Citizenship: Derek Jarman's Jubilee and Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels"
Friday, March 31, 2000 - 11:00 a.m.
Rebecca Comay, Professor of Philosophy and Literary Studies, University of Toronto
"Between Melancholia and Fetishism: Benjamin's Losses"
co-sponsored by the Philosophy Department
Speakers Series 1998-1999
Thursday, September 24, 1998
Ann Kaplan (The Humanities Institute, SUNY, Stony Brook)
"Postmodernism, Imaging and the Millennium: From the Psychic and Political Crisis of Representation to the Crisis of Reproduction"
Thursday, October 15, 1998
Gerard Delanty (Sociology, University of Liverpool)
"Theorising Modernity"
Thursday, November 5, 1998
Teresa Mangum (English, University of Iowa)
"Old Bats; or, The Vampire, Degeneration, and Senescence"
Thursday, November 19, 1998
Zsuzsa Baross (Cultural Studies, Trent University)
"Deconstruction and Responsibility, after 'Bosnia'"
December 3, 1998
Peter Kulchyski (Native Studies, Trent University)
"Feminist Machiavelli reads Livy: Spectres of Lucretia"
January 14, 1999
David Holdsworth (Environmental Resource Studies, Trent University)
"Naturalized Epistemology and Political Reason"
January 28, 1999
Doug Torgerson (Politics, Trent University)
"The three faces of politics: thinking with and against Arendt"
February 1 - 4, 1999 - Ryle Lecture Series
Paul Churchland (University of California, San Diego)
March 4, 1999
Mark Cheetham (University of Western Ontario, Visual Arts)
"Plasmatics: Kant's 'Roman Period' and the Politics of Reception"