2025-26 Speaker Series
Each year The Speaker Series brings in several visiting guest lecturers. Speakers over the years have included Jean Baudrillard, Lauren Berlant, Peter Brooks, Norman Bryson, David Carroll, Anthony Cascardi, Wlad Godzich, Jean-Joseph Goux, Elizabeth Grosz, N. Katherine Hayles, Linda Hutcheon, Martin Jay, Michael Hardt, Agnes Heller, Barbara Johnson, David Farrell Krell, Murray Krieger, Arthur Kroker, Dominick LaCapra, Jerome McGann, J. Hillis Miller, Chantal Mouffe, Christopher Norris, Mark Poster, Richard Rorty, Charles Scott, Thomas Sebeok, Kaja Silverman, Gayatri Spivak, Bernard Stiegler, Samuel Weber, Hayden White, Slavoj Žižek, and many others.
Upcoming speaker:
Tuesday, October 21, 2025
4:00 p.m. EST
STVH 3165Dr. Peter Szendy
David Herlihy Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Brown University
"Pneumatopolitics: Respiring and Conspiring"
Conspiracy has probably become one of the key notions—or fantasies—of our times. Conspiracy, in the modern acceptation of the word (as in “conspiracy theory”), has not only filled the mediasphere in which we live and breathe but it has also overshadowed—maybe we should say repressed—its ancient meaning, i.e. to breathe together. This talk will sketch out an archaeology of the Greek and Latin concepts of sumpnoia and conspiratio as shared breath, tracing their echoes in modern and contemporary discourses about race, psychoanalysis, and the politics of the atmosphere.
Watch some of our previous talks on YouTube
Past Speakers:
Dr. David Marriott
Without Truth: Fanon’s concept of confession
February 13, 2025
Dr. Wayne Hope
The Anthropocene, Global Capitalism and Epochal Crises of Time
January 10, 2025
Dr. Adam Rosenthal
Life as Lineage, or: Literary Apocalypse and the Text of Evolution
October 25, 2024
Dr. David Roden
Nietzschean Hyperagents
September 18, 2024
Dr. Alenka Zupančič
The Logic of Fantasy
May 3, 2024