Humanities Institute Archives | Page 4 of 4

January 9, 2015

Ahmed Alwishah

Ahmed Alwishah’s research focuses on Islamic Philosophy, especially Avicenna, Post-Avicennian philosophers, and Philosophy of Language in Islamic tradition. He is the co-editor of Ibn KammÅ«na Refinement and Commentary of SuhrawardÄ«’s Intimations (Mazda, 2002) and the forthcoming Aristotle and Arabic Tradition, 2015 Cambridge Press.

Jonathan Lethem and David Treuer

Claremont-based novelists David Treuer (Prudence) and Jonathan Lethem (Dissident Gardens) consider the different ways Vladimir Nabokov’s elusive self is simultaneously disclosed and shrouded from view in his treatment of his most arrogant protagonist, and his most retiring. In the process, Treuer and Lethem will disclose (and perhaps shroud) the tricky presence of their own “selves” in the narrational space of their respective fictions.

Humans and Selves: a Humanities Institute conference

Featuring Louise Antony, John Martin Fischer, Derek Parfit, and Andrea Westlund.

Katherine Hayles

Katherine Hayles teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science, and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her print book, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, was published by the University of Chicago Press in spring 2012.

Varieties of Self: a Humanities Institute conference

Featuring Dan Arnold, Naomi Quinn, Eric Schwitzgebel, Kwong-loi Shun, Nina Strohminger, and Robin Wang.

Julia Sushytska

Julia Sushytska (Ph.D., Philosophy, Stony Brook University) specializes in Ancient Greek and 20th century Continental philosophy. Her research focuses on convergences between ideas of Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Plato, and the work of 20th century thinkers, especially Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Julia Kristeva, and Merab Mamardashvili.

Cressida Hayes

Cressida Heyes is the author of Self-Transformations: Defining Women through Feminist Practice (Cornell University Press 2000) and Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (Oxford University Press 2007), as well as the editor of The Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy (Cornell 2003), and Critical Concepts: Gender and Philosophy (Routledge 2011). She co-edited Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer (Ashgate 2009) with Meredith Jones, with whom she is currently co-authoring a book on the feminist politics of sleep.

Nancy Chodorow

Although individuology overlaps with psychology, and several fields in the humanities draw upon psychoanalysis, the study of individuals requires on the one hand a more qualitative, interactive and intersubjective methodology than we find in contemporary psychology and on the other the study of people, not texts.

January 6, 2015

Peggy Phelan

Phelan discusses Cindy Sherman’s photography as a primary precedent for selfies generally, and feminist selfies in particular. It then moves on to a more philosophical and political analysis of what Phelan calls “the porosity of representation,” brought about by transformations in technology and psychology. The talk concludes with a discussion of the future of the self-portrait in the age of performance.