This discussion explores allyship with black women political prisoners from liberation struggles of the 1960s-1970s, when the Black Panther Party was considered a vanguard. In 1973, the Communist Party USA formed the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR), co-headed by Angela Davis, her mother Sallye Davis, and…

Lina Abushouk & Gemma Peacocke

What makes a house a home—at the scale of the gestational? the household? the planetary? Like so many tenets of classical liberalism, “a man’s house is his castle” has supposedly only been affirmed by the fortress-like experience (for some) of the Covid-19 pandemic. But under what conditions can a human under capitalism—particularly a man, in…

Please join us for the

IHUM OPEN HOUSE

Wednesday, November 17, 2021

Michael Rakowitz will speak through projects and materials that
create portals through which the notion of home can be remembered
and re-membered. A conversation on belonging, not belonging,
displacements, violent dispossessions and dinner.

Michael Rakowitz is an Iraqi-American artist…

Graduate Workshop, November 5, 2021

3:00 - 5:00 pm

Malina Buturovic & Junnan Chen

In the patriarchal context of Afghanistan, women have become domesticated through its history. The concept of the home gives full authority to its rulers such as father, brother, and husband;the woman is reduced to property of the owners and heirs, who are still men, in the house. From my personal experience in the broader context of…

"Between Two Worlds? Critical Race Theory and Ottoman Studies”

The property relation of the enslaved included and exceeded that of chattel and real estate. Plantation mortgages exemplify the ways in which the value of people who were enslaved, the land they were forced to labor on, and the houses they were forced to maintain were mutually constitutive.

Cameron Rowland is an American artist,…

Using the Boston Review Forum, Black Study, as an object of reflection, Derecka Purnell will engage with the following questions tied to this year’s IHUM theme “Commons”:  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…

A recurring refrain of the Black Student/Black Studies movements of the 1960s and 1970s was the pledge to produce knowledge in service to the people; to create education relevant for the revolution. Scholarly and popular assessments of the achievement of this aim tend to focus on education and knowledge production that occurred in the academy…

New York-based artist Carissa Rodriguez will present two of her films, “The Maid” (2018) and “The Girls” (1997/2018), which have been shown across the US and abroad. These works are framed by a short story, by Swiss writer Robert Walser, tracking a caregiver’s 20-year search for a charge who got lost under her watch…

Was Trump the nadir we needed? If he is not re-elected, what are the kinds of public things that could usefully provide conceptual and political offramps to (re)build democratic institutions after Trump?

Through targeted, strictly disciplined strength training, Cassils makes their own body the protagonist of their performances; and contemplates the history(s) of violence, representation, struggle, and survival. Drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to social expectations, Cassils speaks about past works and their starting…

This event has been recorded:
https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/

Rio Sofia first encountered sissification porn, where men are forced into womanhood as a form of punishment or humiliation, through…

 Over the last 50 years, translation studies has developed a substantial discourse around all forms of translations. Yet “race,” in relation to translation, remains little discussed. This talk will explore the issue of the translation of Black poets, writers and authors of African heritage, and of “Blackness” itself, particularly with…

This talk seeks to examine the Trend as a model of history. The shape of trends can be seen in statistical graphs as “time series”— a set of points that index and calculate the transient movement of prices or populations. In fashion, trends articulate the changing cut of clothes but also the roving desires of the masses. If the Trend describes…

How can Indigenous land-based practices and knowledge better inform and support solidarity-building across multiple struggles for justice? How can a connection to land, embodied and practiced in place, further the collective goals of decolonization that includes a multiplicity of diverse communities? These inter-related questions will form the…

‘Practice’ is everywhere and by now has been awarded its own, praexological turn. But the challenges are real. Do we have a theory to go by? What do scholarly recipes for reconstructing practices miss? Our own scholarly practice is inevitably entangled with the practices we study. Is there something to be gained from this?

Usually the genre of rehearsal appears as a documented performance of the ‘making of’ in the sense of a (re-)presentation of a prrocess-based ‘in-the-making’ (e.g. in the sense of a repetitive learning exerzise). Since the rehearsal offers an ideal presentation medium for artistic labor and thus a format for redefining work and authorship, it…

Please join us for an informal opportunity to learn about IHUM and a conversation about the formats of humanistic scholarship.

Composer, performer, instrument-builder, and Berkeley-based installation artist Ellen Fullman presents her unique invention: the Long String Instrument, a remarkable architecturally-scaled instrument which resonates space utilizing strings suspended wall-to-wall, transforming the venue into a giant musical instrument.

Join us for the…

The turn to “practice” in Science and Technology Studies has led to several major progressive shifts in the way problems are posed, and added significantly to institutional thinking in other areas, for example that of financial markets. I will point to ways that observing practice can inform, advance, but also challenge, the certainties that…

Judea Pearl recently observed: 'You have the sensation of free will; evolution has equipped us with this sensation.

This talk is located in a shattered, formally inconsistent, yet intelligible zone defined by "being in life without wanting the world." Reading with Claudia Rankine (Don’t Let Me Be Lonely), the novel and film of A Single Man (Christopher Isherwood, 1964; Tom Ford, 2009), and Harryette Mullen (Sleeping with the Dictionary), it describes an aesthetics and a subjectivity shaped on one side by suicide and on the other by a life drive that is also, paradoxically, negative, in that it turns toward life by turning away from the world of injury, negation, and contingency that endures as a defining pressure on biopolitically-defined subjects. It suggests attending to and developing a dissociative poetics. The talk is less abstract than this abstract.

During the first age of mechanical calculation, roughly 1870-1970, humans and machines in astronomical observatories, government census bureaus, and insurance offices worked in tandem to reimagine one of the most ancient forms of human intelligence: how to calculate. What resulted was not an early form of Artificial Intelligence. Instead, the…

Black Code Studies is queer, femme, fugitive, and radical.
Black Code Studies is queer, femme, fugitive, and radical.
Black Code Studies is queer, femme, fugitive, and radical.
And we aren't going anywhere.

Jessica Marie Johnson is a writer and historian of slavery at Johns Hopkins University…

I wonder how to work in already broken worlds. I explore repair as a critical method, in four chapters: reconstruction, refuge, reparation and rescue. Reconstruction, reassembly, retrofitting, are techniques for producing new or improved worlds and infrastructures. Zones of refuge offer fragmented counterworlds, cracks for living in the midst…

I’ll be considering the strange temporality of deadlines (the terrifying word was coined in POW camps and was meant literally). Is there a family resemblance between the emergencies we suffer on a daily and epochal basis – tax returns, due dates, expiration dates, statutes of limitations, biological clocks, ticking bombs, revolutionary crisis points, messianic end-times…?

What happens when the political imagination fails? Can we work past a failure of imagination, or should we 'call it by its real name,' namely a confrontation with reality? Do we have to be able to imagine the shape of something in order to realize it? Is it time for a new philosophy of history?

Please join us from 5:30-6:30pm for an informal opportunity to learn about IHUM and speak to current fellows and faculty affiliated with the Program.

From 6:30-8pm we will celebrate the publication of Keywords; For Further Consideration and Particularly Relevant to Academic Life, Especially as it Concerns Disciplines, Inter…

Protest is vital form of collective work. Most, if not all, of the democratic rights that we enjoy—including democracy itself—are arguably the result of social protest. And yet it seems increasingly clear that contemporary protest is not working. This is a potentially dangerous situation: if protest is broken then positive social change is…

Psychoanalysis involves lots of work: dream-work, the work of mourning, working through, and so on. In this talk, I want to reflect less on metaphorical work than on the practical kind, particularly the work of interpretation in the analytic setting, and its relationship to interpretation in the human sciences. I will speak a bit about the…

This event has been cancelled.

An exercise in thinking with the demons of modern science in an attempt not only to eradicate these imaginary imps but also to capture the insights their perverse viewpoints can offer.

Philippe Descola initially specialized in the ethnology of Amazonia, focusing on how native societies relate to their environment. He has published extensively on his field research with the Achuar of Ecuador and on the comparative analysis of the relations between humans and non-humans. He is Professor of Anthropology at the Collège de France…

A presentation of recent writing experiments that explore the idea of “environmental translations” from architecture, conceptual literature, and studies in the science of perception.

David Gissen is the author of books, essays, exhibitions and experimental writings and projects about environments, landscapes, cities…

An inquiry into play between novelty and repetition within the temporality of revolution, using Hannah Arendt and Karl Marx to read the figure of classical antiquity within the French Revolution.

Miriam Leonard is Professor of Greek Literature and its Reception at University College London. Her research explores the…

An open forum for students and faculty on challenges for the humanities after the election.

Topics to include: free speech on campus, the concept of sanctuary, the status of critique, the use-value of historical parallels, and types and sites of organization—stakeholder activism, affinity groups, and our classrooms, among others.

Drawing on recent work in queer studies on temporality and history, Heather Love reflects on the confusions (self/other, subject/other) that can result from contact with the dead.

Heather Love teaches English and Gender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the…

Charles Ray will discuss in conversation with Hal Foster sculptural decisions generated by thinking sculpturally rather than thinking about sculpture.

Charles Ray is an artist based in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited extensively, at venues including Documenta IX (1992), three iterations of the Venice…

Starting from the philosopher Trenton Merricks’ proposition that there are no statues, only atoms behaving statuewise, Charles Ray reflects on whether he is making sculptures that behave statuewise or statues that behave sculpturewise.

Charles Ray is an artist based in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited…

An inquiry into the paradoxes inherent in figuring time, moving in linear fashion from Hegel and Heidegger to the concept of energy and the heterogeneous durations of vegetal life.

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the
Basque Country, Spain, and…

A tracing of three modes of time in relation to three concepts of law-space—matter, atmosphere, and spatial justice—drawing on post-Deleuzian work in new materialism.

Over the 2015–2016 academic year, the IHUM project New Schools brought four artists into four Princeton classes to devise creative experiments in pedagogy. In this workshop, the participants will present their collaborations and examine what they can reveal about the artistry of teaching. What risks accompany the departure from the norms of…

This performance of "The Best New Work (1)" is part of the IHUM "New Schools" initiative, and is linked to HUM 598: 'The Enacted Thought,' an experimental graduate seminar that examines the relationship between theater and pedagogy.

“Pulling Imaginary Teeth” is the culminating performance-project of HUM 598 “The Enacted Thought” an experimental graduate seminar on theatre and pedagogy being taught this term in IHUM.

A workshop on “dream reconciliation,” in which participants undertake a series of exercises intended to help them enter imaginatively into one another’s dreams.

Paul Chan on the relationship between art and cunning via Odysseus and Adorno.

With Matthew Jesse Jackson, Jenny Perlin, John Tresch, Winnie Wong, and Soyoung Yoon. C

A roundtable on contemporary materialisms vis-à-vis genealogies, paths not taken, and reanimated corpses, with Charles Wolfe (Ghent), Andrew Cole (English), Brooke Holmes (Classics), and Federico Marcon (East Asian/History).

Walid Raad inquires into the impact of forms of extreme violence on bodies, minds, and culture via two of his acclaimed long-term art projects: “The Atlas Group” (1989-2004) and “Scratching on things I could disavow” (2007-present).

Exercises in conjectural historiography, with Carla Nappi, Dominic Pettman, Lytle Shaw, Justin E. H. Smith.

Reviel Netz (Stanford) will consider mathematical writing as a form of writing, characterized by its style and by its aesthetic dimensions. Examples primarily from the seminal era of mathematical writing, ancient Greek geometry.

The faculty and graduate students of the Spring 2015 course HUM 599 “Experience”, travelled to Ljubljana, Slovenia in August to participate in the Ljubljana Graphic Art Biennial. Students were invited to stage their work at this annual international event.

A symposium on the question of trust, from bonds of love and friendship, to law and contract, to the background assumptions of civil society and technological mastery or dependence. With Joshua Clover, John Jackson, Andrew Ross, Winnie Wong.

An international conference on the legacy of Jacques Derrida, ten years after his death. (In conjunction with the IHUM fall graduate seminar taught by Eduardo Cadava and Avital Ronell.)

An afternoon symposium on new techniques and technologies of intellectual exchange: the experiences they offer, the experiences they represent, the experiences they displace; beauty in all, its costs and benefits.

An opening reception (featuring an exhibit of experiments in the aesthetics of information) will be held in the School of Architecture. All are welcome. Exhibition on view: February 6- 20, 2014.

With Asad Raza and a panel of scholars, critics, and current interpreters, a discussion of the place of This situation—its intellectual curiosities and its aesthetic principles—as alternative pedagogy in the context of the university.

A work by Tino Sehgal, which brings together interpreters and visitors in a conversation, at once choreographed and spontaneous, about such questions as the aesthetics of existence and the movement from a society of lack to one of abundance.

At the beginning of May, IHUM convened a gathering of scholars to consider our relations to the vegetable kingdom. Perspectives were various, and questions were big: What are we to the plants, and the plants to us? What possibilities does plant life offer not simply for how we conceptualize the matter of life, and our lives, but also for…

A project of plant collaborations, which will be on exhibit outside of Betts Auditorium in the School of Architecture, beginning with the opening reception.

A panel discussion of the exhibition at MoMA. With contributions by Yve-Alain Bois, Brigid Doherty, Michael Jennings, Susan Stewart, Dmitri Tymoczko, and curator Leah Dickerman. Moderated by Hal Foster.

A gathering of the disciplines to listen, think, and talk about George Gershwin’s “Summertime” and its seventy-seven year history, with Daphne Brooks, Steve Mackey, Tracy K. Smith, and Michael Wood. With an open call for voiceovers.

Three-minute manifesti on matters of urgency, from members of the graduate and faculty communities. Judges Martin Puchner and Simon Critchley. A summit of our convictions, with reflections on the form.

OLS is a performance project combining collective activity, self-reflexive examinations of the art world’s public life, and a concern for art’s movement through institutional and technological mediation.

Shigehisa Kuriyama will consider questions of tension and attention in view of the new technologies of scholarship, when text is fused with image and sound, and readers are as likely to swipe screens as turn pages. A talk and practicum.

A symposium on the reception of Brian Dillon's 24-Hour Book, featuring contributors to a new collection of (very) recent essays in response. An experiment in the radical compression of culture.

A day-long symposium celebrating the fortieth issue, and tenth anniversary, of Cabinet magazine, a fellow traveler with IHUM along paths among and athwart the disciplines.