CLICK HERE TO REGISTER About the Lecture Differentiation denotes the process that relates the same to the different instead of opposing them. The evolution of all languages, literatures, and cultures seems to be underlain by such a complex process of differentiation. In order to explore this complex process, I developed a comparative method applying...
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CLICK HERE TO REGISTER About the Lecture In his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault intends to offer a “genealogy of the subject of desire” and of the “arts of existence” through the experience of the flesh, in the comparative passage from the Greco-Roman paradigm to Christianity in the first centuries. Relying on philosophers, moralists, physicians,...
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER About the Lecture “Fortress Europe” is not a fortress. The metaphor is useful and successful however, because it points a process which seems self-evident, even if it is far from making sense when we take a closer look: the fact that migration policies have mostly become border policies. European states seek...
This event has been cancelled About the Speaker Renaud Gagné is Professor in Ancient Greek Literature and Religion at the University of Cambridge, where he has taught in the Faculty of Classics since 2009, and a Fellow of Pembroke College. He has published most recently Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology...
A roundtable organized and moderated by Professor Giulia Sissa (Departments of Political Science, Comparative Literature and Classics, UCLA). “Decolonizing Classics” is a novel challenge for scholars in the Humanities and, even more pointedly, for those who study the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. The stake is not merely relevance, usefulness or epistemic legitimacy, but...
Organized and moderated by Professor Giulia Sissa (Classics, Political Science, Comparative Literature – UCLA). Follow this link to register to attend online with Zoom. “Decolonizing Classics” is a novel challenge for scholars in the Humanities and, even more pointedly, for those who study the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. The stake is not merely relevance,...
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER About the lecture: Jean-François Champollion is a hero of French republicanism, even though he is known today mainly for deciphering the hieroglyphs. Tellingly, his statue stands in front of France’s most important educational institution, the Collège de France, sculpted by none other than Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi of the Statue of Liberty in New...
Register for the February 6th, 2023 in-person ECT seminar session on Prof. Valerio’s book, Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640 (Cambridge UP, 2022). Space is limited for in-person participation in the seminar. RSVP (first come, first served) to zs@humnet.ucla.edu About the Author: Miguel A. Valerio is assistant professor of Spanish at Washington University in...
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER Abstract: In this lecture, Nadia Yala Kisukidi conceives of literature through a spatial understanding of “diaspora” at the crossroads between France and central Africa. Landscapes and borders come together in private lives and create new spaces for the imagination, where a specific understanding of “diaspora” opens a reflection on the literary...
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER Patrick Boucheron has been Professor at the Collège de France since 2015 (chair in History of Powers in Western Europe from the 13th to the 16th century). He specializes in the European Middle Ages, particularly in Italy. His work also concerns the writing of history and changes in the discipline. It...
The Lad Taiyota, Native of Otaheite, in the dress of his Country, from Sydney Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, in his Majesty’s Ship the Endeavour, London, Printed for Stanfield Parkinson, the editor, and sold by Richardson and Urquhart, etc., 1773, pl. IX. Mélanie Traversier is Professor of Early Modern History at the...
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER Abstract: In response to postcolonial critiques of the Eurocentrism of Marx’s theory of history, a new wave of scholarship has questioned whether Marx held on to this theory in his late work. Scholars have argued that in Marx’s late journalistic and ethnographic writings, his teleological and stadial theory of universal history...
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER. Abstract: The idea of deconstruction as formulated by Heidegger (before Derrida and differently from him) implies to question the provenance of our concepts in order to bring out ways of relating to phenomena that have been concealed by a received and crystallized conceptuality. I would like to illustrate this idea from...
Abstract: Aristotle’s Poetics, which provides the earliest Western theory of fictional narrative (muthos), has in turn become an object of fiction for contemporary novelists (Borges, Eco). But the story of the Poetics goes back earlier: Aristotle as poetician was chosen as the subject of a painting by Rembrandt, and since the Renaissance, his poetical theories have...
A roundtable organized by Giulia Sissa (Classics, Political Science, UCLA). Iacopo Costa (CNRS and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) “Can We Bypass the Middle Ages When We Read Aristotle?” Dimitris Vardoulakis (Western Sydney University) “Aristotle’s Phronesis: a Hidden Presence in Political Philosophy?” Guillaume Navaud (Lycée Henri IV) “Correcting/Cancelling Evil in Literature: a Resurgence of an Anti-Aristotelian Platonism?” Davide Panagia (Political Science, UCLA)...
Abstract: Freud famously stated that literature was the royal road to psychoanalysis. Following course, Lacan noted, in “The Signification of the Phallus”, that if one wanted to understand human sexuality and desire, better read Sophocle’s Oedipus, or Longus’s Daphnis and Chloë, than rely on biological inquiry and data . Even Foucault described his project to...
Abstract: Marco Polo and his father and uncle spent seventeen years in China, and because of his personal history there, Sinologists have long scrutinized and debated his connection to the larger history of China and his status as a historical writer of China. In response to biographical discussions about Polo in Sinology, this talk investigates...
Abstract: Innumerable types of graphic marks populated the visual environment of Mediterranean cities in the later Roman empire. Different sign systems competed over every imaginable surface, from walls to papyrus, lead or gems, objects to clothes and bodies, for attention, recognition, and power. That vast repertoire of signs interacted with viewers in a thousand different...