Robert Hass

Robert Hass is an award-winning UC Berkeley professor of English and former U.S. poet laureate. He has won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his latest book, "Time and Materials."

Charles Taylor: Keynote Lecture

Author and philosopher Charles Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Philosophy at McGill University. He obtained a B.A. in history from McGill (1952). A Rhodes Scholar, he pursued his studies in political science, philosophy and economics at Oxford University, where he obtained a B.A. (1955), an M.A. (1960) and a Ph.D. (1961).

Professor Taylor has taught in numerous institutions, including Northwestern, Berkeley, Stanford and Yale, Frankfurt University in Germany, and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also held the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University. His research focuses, in particular, on modernity, pluralism, multiculturalism, the question of identity, and secularism. (Bio taken from CCAPRCD


The New School
New York, NY
May 4th, 2007

A Key Note Lecture by Philosopher Charles Taylor at the Secular Imaginaries Conference.

The New School for Social Research at the New School and the Center for Transcultural Studies, a Chicago-based scholarly network, jointly sponsored a conference on the work of Charles Taylor.

The conference focus was on Taylor's work in the last two decades, starting from Sources of the Self published in 1989 and reaching into the present with the forthcoming book, A Secular Age (2007) originating from his more recent Gifford Lectures.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. She is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000), Hegemony, Contingency, Universality, with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, (Verso Press, 2000). In 2004, she published Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning with Verso Press which considered questions of war, representation, and ethics.That same year, The Judith Butler Reader appeared, edited by Sara Salih, with Blackwell Publishers. In 2004, collection of her essays on gender and sexuality, Undoing Gender, appeared with Routledge. Her most recent book, Giving an Account of Oneself, appeared with Fordham University Press (2005) and considers the relation between subject formation and ethical obligation, situating ethics in relation to critique and social theory. She is currently working on essays pertaining to Jewish Philosophy, focusing on pre- and post-Zionist criticisms of state violence, under contract with Columbia University Press. She is also working on a set of essays on current wars, focusing on the relation between violence, non-violence, sexual politics and allied forms of resistance. She hopes to write a small book on Kafka's parables in the future. She continues to write on contemporary politics, cultural and literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, and sexual politics. (Bio taken from UCBerkeley)

Judith Butler, feminist philosopher lecturing about "Primo Levy for the Present"; narrative accounts, forgiveness, holocaust, Auschwitz, victims, execution, war, and crime, while asking the question: "What is to give an Account of Oneself?".

Donna Haraway

In terms of research, writing, and teaching, Donna Haraway is one of the most important practitioners in a field broadly defined as science studies. Having done an undergraduate degree at Colorado College with a major in Zoology and minors in Philosophy and English, she went on to complete her Ph.D. at Yale in Biology (but with an "interdisciplinary arrangement" with the Departments of Biology, Philosophy, and History of Science and Medicine). She began her teaching career at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, moved to Johns Hopkins, and joined the History of Consciousness Board at UC Santa Cruz in 1984. Once again defying traditionally defined departmental categorization, however, Professor Haraway holds associate memberships in Anthropology, Environmental Studies, and Women's Studies.

Donna Haraway is a leading theorist of the relationships between people and machines, her work having incited debate in fields as varied as primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology. A cyborg, she explained in her book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), is a "hybrid of machine and organism." It is a "fusion of the organic and the technical forged in particular, historical, cultural practices." "The Cyborg Manifesto," first published in 1985, is now taught in undergraduate classes at countless universities and has been reprinted or translated in numerous anthologies in North America, Japan, and Europe.

Also:



Donna Haraway, Avenali Lecture Fall 2003 - From Cyborgs to Companion Species: Dogs, People, and Technoculture
September 16, 2003, 10:59AM
Morrison Library

Click Here to Watch

Slavoj Žižek: Violence Interview

Slavoj Zizek is a professor at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana and at the European Graduate School EGS who uses popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and the theory of Jacques Lacan to explain politics and popular culture. He was born in 1949 in Ljubljana, Slovenia where he lives to this day but he has lectured at universities around the world. He was analysed by Jacques Alain Miller, Jacques Lacan's son in law, and is probably the most successful and prolific post-Lacanian having published over fifty books including translations into a dozen languages. He is a leftist and, aside from Lacan he was strongly influenced by Marx, Hegel and Schelling. In temperament, he resembles a revolutionist more than a theoretician. He was politically active in Slovenia during the 80s, a candidate for the presidency of the Republic of Slovenia in 1990; most of his works are moral and political rather than purely theoretical. He has considerable energy and charisma and is a spellbinding lecturer in the tradition of Lacan and Kojeve. (Click Here for Full Biography)

Cornel West on Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism

One of America's most provocative public intellectuals, Cornel West has been a champion for racial justice since childhood. His writing, speaking, and teaching weave together the traditions of the black Baptist Church, progressive politics, and jazz. The New York Times has praised his "ferocious moral vision."
Currently the Class of 1943 Professor at Princeton University, West burst onto the national scene in 1993 with his bestselling book, Race Matters, a searing analysis of racism in American democracy. Race Matters has become a contemporary classic, selling more than a half a million copies to date. In addition, West has published 16 other books and has edited 13 texts.
West earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard in three years, magna cum laude. Martin Kilson, one of his professors there, describes West as "the most intellectually aggressive and highly cerebral student I have taught." After earning his Ph.D. at Princeton, he became a professor of religion and director of the Afro-American Studies program there. West has also taught at Union Theological Seminary, Yale, Harvard, and the University of Paris.
In his last book Democracy Matters, West analyzes the arrested development of democracy both in America and in the crisis-ridden Middle East. He argues that if America is to become a better steward of democratization around the world, it must first recognize its own long history of imperialist corruption. His latest CD, Never Forget: A Journey of Revelations is a collection of socially conscious music featuring collaborations with Prince, Outkast, Jill Scott, Talib Kweli. West also offers commentary weekly on The Tavis Smiley Show from PRI.
West was an influential force in developing the storyline for the popular Matrix movie trilogy and has served as its official spokesperson, as well as playing a recurring role in the final two films. (Information taken from cornelwest.com)

On Emerson: A Collection of Christopher Lydon's Discussions

Christopher Lydon speaks to biographer Bob Richardson, Cornell West and others on some things Emerson.

Click Here to Listen