To attend the 2025 public lectures,
you must register using the links below
Monday, June 9th, 5pm
Lewis Gordon
"Fanon at 100: A Lecture on Black Existentialism, Decolonizing Knowledge, Liberation, and Freedom"
This lecture will focus on themes of existentialism, especially Black Existentialism, and the role they play in the ongoing task of liberating humanity from epistemic bigotry and the difficult task of building practices of freedom. This will be done in no small part through commemorating, with great care to his thought and praxis, Frantz Fanon, the revolutionary psychiatrist and philosopher from Martinique, as 2025 marks the 100th anniversary of his birth.
Register here.
Tuesday, June 10th, 5pm
Rashid Khalidi
"Britain, Ireland, and Palestine"
What links Ireland and Palestine to one another? They have inter-twined histories in several respects. Both were subjected to overseas settler colonialism – albeit of different natures and durations, with forceful British imperial intrusions producing intractable conflicts along national and religious lines with violent sequels that resonate down to the present day. They are also linked by a temporal coincidence involving British colonial rule. This ended in (most of) Ireland in 1922. During that precise period Britain occupied Palestine to implement a neo-colonial League of Nations mandate drafted to further the Zionist project, using tactics of repression honed in fighting the Irish.
Register here.
Wednesday, June 11th, 5pm
Bernard Harcourt
"Life, Death, and Juridical Power"
The state of Alabama began executing the condemned by means of nitrogen gas asphyxiation in January 2023, after a long history of botched and failed executions. In the modern death penalty era, Alabama alone accounts for more than half of executions in which the condemned person survives the torturous ordeal. That has not stopped the state, though, from meting out the final punishment, or even forging new methods of execution. And it has not inspired a single federal court to intervene. How should we think about the state’s exercise of juridical power in the contemporary era—after the age of discipline and rehabilitation, of sovereign displays of public torment, of, perhaps even, biopower? I have been representing men on death row in Alabama for over three decades now and still do not have complete answers. But I will propose timely reflections in this public lecture.
Register here.
friday, June 13th, 5pm
Homi Bhabha
"Race, Time, Terror: On Affective Color"
This lecture explores Sigmund Freud's distinction between "traumatic neuroses"—produced in times of war or in the aftermath of sudden accidents involving fatal risks—and "spontaneous neuroses" that are habitually investigated and treated by analysis. It focuses on the brevity of the temporal occurrence of traumatic neuroses, whose powerful "affective coloring" transplants the subjects into an anxiety of imminent anticipation. In dealing with experiences of racial fixation, postcolonial and contemporary, the lecture argues for a distinction between systemic racism and traumatic racism.
Register here.
