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January 2023
Geraldine Heng holds an endowed chair in English and Comparative Literature, along with appointments in Middle Eastern Studies, Women's Studies, Jewish Studies, and the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Social Justice. She is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and the author of numerous books, including The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (2018), which won four books prizes. An excerpt from that book was adapted for the Cambridge Elements series as England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West (2019). Her most recent book is The Global Middle Ages: An Introduction (2021).The title of his lecture at UIUC is a quote adapted from Anthropology: Why it Matters (2018).
Geraldine Heng's lecture "Race Before the Modern Era: 'Presentism,' 'Intersectionality,' and the Politics of Keywords," took place on January 26, 2023 at 5:15PM in the Levis Center. Dr. Heng's Krouse Family Visiting Scholar in Judaism and Western Culture Fund Lecture was co-sponsored by the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, the Program in Medieval Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory.
March 2023
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Kaja Silverman (University of Pennsylvania Sachs Professor of Art History) has been an important theorist of visuality for the past four decades. In 2011 she was given the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award by the Mellon Foundation in recognition of her outstanding contributions to scholarship. Her Subject of Semiotics (1983) became an immediate classic for its brilliant yet succinct explanation of semiotic theory from Saussure and Peirce to Barthes and Derrida. This was followed by The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (1988), Male Subjectivity at the Margins (19892), The Threshhold of the Visible World (1996), and eight other books and edited volumes. Drawing from her most recent book, The Miracle of Analogy: or The History of Photography, Part I (2015), and its sequel—A Three-Personed Picture—which she is currently writing, her discussion at UIUC will consider photography as the agency through which the world reveals itself to us, and will focus on images in whose formation the photographer played only a nominal role.
Kaja Silverman's lecture “Before the Before,” will take place on March 24, 2023 at 3:00 pm in the Levis Center. The lecture will be followed by an interview with the speaker, discussion with the audience, and a light reception.
April 2023
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Tim Ingold is a renowned anthropologist whose work has examined the relationship between the material and the social in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, art, and architecture. A phenomenologist, Ingold sees humans as beings that move through and sense a world that is itself also moving. In recent work, he has sought to replace traditional models of genetic and cultural transmission of practical knowledge, which rely on an alliance between neo-Darwinian biology and cognitive science, with a relational approach that focuses on the development of embodied skills of perception and action within social and environmental contexts. Ingold holds the Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, and he is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His 18 books and edited volumes, which have been widely translated, include The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on Human Ecology and Social Relations (1986), Lines: A Brief History (2007), Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (2011), and Correspondances (2021). The title of his lecture at UIUC is a quote adapted from Anthropology: Why it Matters (2018).
Tim Ingold's lecture “Philosophy with the People In: The Trajectory of an Environmental Anthropologist,” took place on April 21, 2023, at 3:00 in the Levis Center. The lecture was followed by an interview with Professor Ingold, a discussion with the audience, and a light reception.