Lunchtime Talk Series

The Universal and the Particular

2022–2023 Lunchtime Talk Series

What does it mean to think the universal from the particular (in this moment, from our varying locations)?

Home

2021–2022 Lunchtime Talk Series

Over the past year, our relationship to the home has been profoundly transformed. For those of us who could retreat into our homes for safety, homemaking and worldmaking were elided, lives reduced to fit the space of a screen.

Commons

2020–2021 Lunchtime Talk Series

What are the possibilities for the university as a commons? Is such an aim even desirable? As public health proscribes coming together in person and old dangers impinge on communities in new forms, we invite you to think together with us on an old question.

Counting/Recounting: 2019–2020 Lunchtime Talk Series

When supplied by the prefix of repetition, “re-”, the English “counting” (to compute) becomes “recounting” (to tell). This proximity between the numerical and the narrative also exists in other language families, too. Contemporary German exhibits zählen (to count) and erzählen (to recount, to tell). While the Latin re- and the German er- only…

Practice / Product / Process: 2018–2019 Lunchtime Talk Series

'As a concept, methodological commitment, and object of study, practice has assumed enormous significance among social scientists and humanists. As an analytical category, practice foregrounds the routine activity constitutive of intellectual, cultural, and political work, and thereby reframes the vexed opposition of product and process. The…

Work: 2017–2018 Lunchtime Talk Series

The broad category of “work” commonly denotes the exertion of effort to achieve a purpose. But history and experience tell us that things don’t always work out as planned. The 2017–18 lunchtime talk series of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton aims to reconsider WORK through the multiplicity of concepts it…

Wave / History / Time: 2016–2017 Lunchtime Talks Series

A lunchtime talk series devoted to rethinking the concept of historical time through the figure of the wave, with speakers from legal theory, environmental studies, architectural theory, feminist and queer theory, classical reception studies, and the history of science.