IHUM supports interdisciplinary student and faculty conferences, lectures, and colloquiums throughout the academic year. This years co-sponsored events are listed below.
This conference will investigate the relationship of mysticism and modernism in literary theory, theology, gender studies, hermeneutics, and art history, particularly as it relates to the theory and criticism of Margarete Susman, a German-Jewish under-recognized critic and scholar of religion whose wide-ranging theories bring together a stunningly wide array of disciplines and fields.
Derrida’s Futures: Secrets from the Archive brings together scholars from various countries and disciplines to mark the 20th anniversary of Jacques Derrida’s death, the 10th anniversary of Firestone Library’s acquisition of Derrida’s personal library, and the launch of the digital archive of more than 40 years of Derrida’s seminars.
Benjamin Bratton
Philosophy of Technology and Speculative Design University of California, San Diego
Director, Antikythera program
April 10th, 4:30pm – Aaron Burr Hall, 219
October 6, 2023
The first talk in the series of “Smells, Sounds, and Textures of Iberian Modernity”
May 1, 2023
Come engage with Alda Balthrop-Lewis as part of the Religion and Environmental Justice Event Series. Dr. Balthrop-Lewis will cover themes in her book Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism (Cambridge, 2021)
April 14, 2023
What is taboo? This question shapes our relationship to language, in turn shaping the boundaries of communities, cultures, and literary canons. A term borrowed from Tongan, a Polynesian language. a "taboo" is primarily a religious imperative. A taboo might be a person, animal, or object that cannot be approached or touched because it is sacred. At the same time, a taboo also functions as a prohibition-as a rule that cannot be transgressed.
March 4-5, 2023
Department of Classics, Department of Philosophy, Program in Classical Philosophy, Humanities Council, Program in the History of Science, Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Center for Human Values, IHUM, Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Program in the Ancient World
February 28, 2023, 4:30pm
Ruda and Yeung present in philosophical-poetic counterpoint a series of meditations on the wager of thought and of the speculative possibility of thought‘s own impossible objectification (in language as a given position or mode). In so doing they address as concepts or potentialities a suite of ideas that allow the exposure of a given symptom of speculation – capital, the stuck, foreignness, the absolute, the break – . Can the poet, can the philosopher speak to this (to each other)? This question, the site of experiment. The counterpoint’s possibility, the wager.
February 27, 2023: Frank Ruda
March 22, 2023: Yuk Hui
April 19, 2023: Nadia Bou-Ali
Universality has a bad reputation. Today’s default position seems to be a critique of its immanent exclusions if not the outright claim of its impossibility. However, universal aspirations also appear to be inseparably linked to projects of political emancipation, scientific validity, and artistic quality.
February 24, 2023, 9:30am – 11:45 am
Jane O. Newman (UC Irvine) and Ron Sadan (Princeton University)
What was it that so convinced Auerbach of Vico’s relevance to his times that he sought to “make a home in Germany,” as he put it in 1922 for the eighteenth-century Neapolitan?
February 23, 2023, 4:30pm - 6:00pm: Public Lecture with Sara Nadal-Melsió
February 24, 2023,12:00 pm - 1:30pm: Seminar with Eduardo Cadava
The lecture is co-sponsored by the Humanities Council, the Program in Media and Modernity, the Departments of English and Comparative Literature, the Committee on Film Studies, European Cultural Studies, and IHUM
February 15, 2023: Kimberly Bain
March 28, 2023: Anna Tsing
This year’s Contemporary Poetry Colloquium focuses on ecotheories and ecopoetics—the work of scholars for whom ecology becomes a foundation for theories of literature, and for whom literature becomes a foundation for theories of ecology.
November 17, 2022
Professor Drew Daniel (Johns Hopkins University) will give the first lecture of the series entitled “Imoinda’s Smile,” Professor Daniel’s talk will focus on the harrowing scene in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko when its eponymous figure “mutilates” Imoinda’s face. Daniel will consider the ethics of this aestheticized violence, situating it in relation to the discourses of race and slavery that permeate the work.
November 1-2, 2022
Wolfgang Schaeffner will deliver a lecture drawn from the current projects of the Gropius Program and the UBA and the Image Knowledge Gestaltung Excellence Cluster that he co-directs with art historian Horst Bredekamp and biomedical engineer Peter Fratzl at the HU.
Sponsored by Program in Media+Modernity and the Departments of Art & Archaeology and German and IHUM
October 6-8, 2022
This year’s annual Princeton South Asia Graduate Conference questions the scholarly paradigm of postcoloniality for representing South Asia. After a hiatus due to the pandemic, this conference will take place October 6-8,2022. Keynotes: Priyamvada Gopal (Faculty of English, Cambridge University), Natasha Ginwala (Associate Curator, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin), and photojournalist-activist Shahidul Alam.