Tracie Matysik (University of Texas Austin), “Bear Life / Bare Life: Bruno, Biopolitics, and Sovereignty in the Bavarian Alps” (Modern Europe Colloquium)

Event time: 
Monday, October 27, 2025 - 4:00pm
Location: 
HQ 107 (320 York Street) See map
Event description: 
The Modern Europe Colloquium presents Tracie Matysik, Professor of History, Fellow of the Bolton Professorship in Secular Studies, University of Texas at Austin, on “Bear Life / Bare Life: Bruno, Biopolitics, and Sovereignty in the Bavarian Alps”
 
Bio: Tracie Matysik works in the field of modern European intellectual history. She is the author of When Spinoza Met Marx: Experiments in Non-Humanist Activity (University of Chicago Press) and of Reforming the Moral Subject: Ethics and Sexuality in Central Europe, 1890-1930 (Cornell University Press), as well as co-editor of German Modernities from Wilhelm to Weimar: A Contest of Futures (Bloomsbury Press). In addition, she has written articles on the histories of Spinozism, psychoanalysis, secularism, subjectivity, international activism, and sexuality. She is currently working on a book project on “bear life” and “bare life,” or a study of nonhuman animals and their role in formations of law, sovereignty, and biopolitics. In 2016 she became co-editor of the journal Modern Intellectual History. She is fellow of the Brian F. Bolton Professorship in Secular Studies.
 
The Modern Europe Colloquium is generously sponsored by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; and the European Studies Council of the Yale MacMillan Center