Adam Talib on “As Inconvenient and Offensive as Abundance.” This lecture is part of the UCLA Program in Experimental Critical Theory co-directed by Giulia Sissa (Political Science/Classics) and Zrinka Stahuljak (Comparative Literature/ELTS). Generously sponsored by the Dean of Humanities and the Dean of Social Sciences and co-sponsored by the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies. Register to...
This lecture has been canceled. The next guest lecture by the Program in Experimental Critical Theory will be on Monday, February 28th by Professor Elissa Marder of Emory University. Click here for more information and to RSVP.
RSVP HERE Click here to download the flyer for this guest lecture.
About the Lecture It’s easy to compare things that are produced near each other, by people who are able to influence each other. Traditionally, comparative literature has therefore compared literatures in close contact with each other: at first European literatures; later literatures in European languages around the world, and sometimes even contemporary literatures in non-European...
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE LECTURE About the Lecture Debates over freedom of speech and its proper limits have become a recurrent feature of European and American public life in recent years. This talk examines the inherently comparative logics of these debates, the ways in which they figure and refigure differences between countries, legal...
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE LECTURE About the Lecture World literature or global literature is now taught in many universities around the world. But is the concept of world literature fully satisfactory? Does it not impose limitations on the texts we read, and on the very way we are supposed to read? The...
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER About the Lecture I would like first to question the benefit that specialists of Greco-Roman slavery can gain from dialogue with the historians of slavery from other periods. Considering the question of the relationship between debt, servitude and slavery in archaic Greece, I will first show how recent approaches in the...
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...
Check back soon for more details regarding this lecture.
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...