Kenneth Reinhard is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA.  He is an expert in early modern English literature, Shakespeare, psychoanalysis, Jewish studies, and critical theory.  He is the author, with Slavoj Zizek and Eric Santner of The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (U. of Chicago Press, 2005), and with Julia Reinhard Lupton, of After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Cornell UP, 1993), as well as articles on Freud, Lacan, Levinas, Henry James, Jewish Studies, and the Bible. He has edited a special issue of Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonialism on Religion with Julia Reinhard Lupton. Currently he is writing a book on the ethics of the neighbor in religion (Torah, Talmud, and Patristic writings), philosophy (Kant, Kierkegaard, Adorno, Rosenzweig, and Levinas), and psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan) for Princeton University Press.

 

The Kenneth Reinhard workshop is scheduled for November 20th at 10 am in the English Department Reading Room (Neuberger 407). To view the recommended readings, click here.

A discussion of new issues and directions in environmental history with major national scholars in the field.  Participants are to be announced. Moderated by Professor Bill Lang, Department of History at Portland State University and editor of the Oregon Encyclopedia Project. 

David Theo Goldberg is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the  University of California, Irvine and Director of the UC system’s Humanities Research Institute. Professor Goldberg's work ranges over issues of political theory, race and racism, ethics, law and society, critical theory, cultural studies and, increasingly, digital humanities. Together with Cathy Davidson of Duke University, he founded the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) to promote partnerships between the human sciences, arts, social sciences and technology and supercomputing interests for advancing research, teaching and public outreach. He and Davidson recently published The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, a summary report of the forthcoming book, The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (forthcoming, MIT Press). He has authored numerous books, including The Threat of Race (2008); The Racial State (2002); Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America (1997); Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning  (1993); and Ethical Theory and Social Issues: Historical Texts and Contemporary Readings (1989/1995). He has also edited or co-edited many volumes, including A Companion to Gender Studies (2005); A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies (2002); Between Law and Culture: Relocating Legal Studies (2002); Relocating Postcolonialism (2002);  Race Critical Theories: Text and Context  (2001); Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (1994); Jewish Identity (1993); and Anatomy of Racism (1990).

Lauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Professor of English and Womens Studies, University of Chicago.  Professor Berlant's research focuses on the legal and normative production of personhood in the U.S. nineteenth and twentieth centuries—now the twenty-first: in particular, citizenship, formal and informal. By formal she designates state, juridical, and institutional practices of zoning and more abstract boundary drawing—between public and private, or white and non-white, or citizen and foreigner. She has recently finished a trilogy of books on national sentimentality now—the first and third in the series are The Anatomy of National Fantasy (1991), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997), and The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008).  Her edited volumes include Intimacy (Chicago, 2000) and (with Lisa Duggan) Our Monica, Ourselves: Clinton and the Affairs of State 2001, and Compassion: the Culture and Politics of an Emotion (2004).

This national conference follows upon the inaugural conference from last year, and will bring over sixty scholars from across diverse disciplines and backgrounds to Portland to draw out the controversies over the meaning and practice of sustainability.

Professor of English and Dean of the Humanities at Duke University, Professor Aravamudan is also the president of the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. Aravamudan specializes in eighteenth century British and French literature and in postcolonial literature and theory. He is the author of essays in Diacritics, ELH, Social Text, Novel, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Anthropological Forum, South Atlantic Quarterly and other venues. His study, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (1999) won the outstanding first book prize of the Modern Language Association in 2000. He has also edited Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings of the British Romantic Period: Volume VI Fiction (1999). His book, Guru English: South Asian Religion in A Cosmopolitan Language was published by Princeton University Press in January 2006, and republished by Penguin India in 2007. He is working on two book-length studies, one on the eighteenth-century French and British oriental tale, and the other on sovereignty and anachronism.