Whitney Humanities Center announces 2017 Schulman lecture series, entitled “Reports from Nonhuman Worlds.”

September 12, 2017

The Whitney Humanities Center has announced the speakers for its Fall 2017 Schulman Lectures in Science and the Humanities series, which this year is titled “Reports from Nonhuman Worlds.” The speakers are Jacques Lezra, Manuel DeLanda, and Claire Colebrook.

On Sept. 18, Jacques Lezra, professor of Hispanic studies at the University of California-Riverside, will deliver a talk on “Atomic Sex: Lucretius’s Material Republic.” Lezra has taught at Yale, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and New York University, with visiting positions at University of California-Irvine and Harvard University. His most recent book, “Contra todos los fueros de la muerte: El suceso cervantino” (2016), is a collection of articles and previously unpublished essays plus reprinted chapters from his first book, “Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe” (1997). 

On Oct. 2, Manuel DeLanda, an artist, philosopher, and one-time independent filmmaker, will deliver a lecture titled “The Philosophy of Chemistry.” DeLanda currently teaches in the architecture departments of Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Pratt Institute. His most recent book is “Philosophical Chemistry” (2015), and he has recently returned to his independent filmmaking practice.

On Nov. 6, Claire Colebrook, the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Philosophy, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Pennsylvania State University, will deliver a talk on “Fragility, Globalism, and the End of the World.” Colebrook has focused on contemporary European philosophy, literary history, gender studies, queer theory, visual culture, and feminist philosophy in her writing. She is now working on book about fragility, “fragility of the species, the archive, and the earth.”

The Shulman Lecture Series is an annual program that organizes up to four lectures by visiting scholars, offered in conjunction with an undergraduate seminar taught on a topic that bridges the humanities and sciences. The seminar bears the same title as the lectures, “Reports from Non-Human Worlds” and is taught by Paul North, professor of Germanic languages and literatures at Yale. The lectures are presented under the auspices of the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities, which is made possible by the generosity of Richard and Barbara Franke. The lecture series is named after Robert Shulman, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, and senior research scientist in diagnostic radiology, “in recognition of his roles as a Founding Fellow of the Whitney and as an unwavering supporter of the integration of science and the humanities.”

All three Shulman Lectures are free and open to the public, and will be held at 5 p.m. in Room 208 of the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street.

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