Juliet Mitchell Patrick Baert Ted Honderich Jeffrey T. Schnapp Siva Vaidhyanathan Masao Miyoshi Jack Goody |
MAIN SPEAKERS
The 2005 Humanities Conference will feature plenary session addresses by some of the world's leading thinkers and innovators in the field of the humanities, as well as numerous parallel presentations by researchers and practitioners.
Garden Conversation Sessions
Main speakers will make formal 30 minute presentations in the plenary sessions. They will also participate in 60 minute Garden Conversation sessions at the same time as the parallel sessions. The setting is a circle of chairs outdoors. These sessions are entirely unstructured - a chance to meet the plenary speaker and talk with them informally about the issues arising from their presentation.The Speakers
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Juliet Mitchell
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Patrick Baert
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Ted Honderich
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Jeffrey T. Schnapp
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Siva Vaidhyanathan
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Masao Miyoshi
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Jack Goody
Juliet Mitchell is Professor in Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge
and a Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge. She is a Full Member of the International Psychoanalytic Society.
Her books include:
Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition,
Women: the Longest Revolution; and
Psychoanalysis and Feminism and Women’s Estate.
Her latest book, Siblings, will be published by Polity Press in October 2003.
Juliet Mitchell is married to anthropologist Jack Goody and has one daughter and five step-children.
She lives in Cambridge, U.K.
Patrick Baert is University Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Cambridge University and Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge.
He studied at the Universities of Brussels and Oxford. He works on social theory and philosophy of social science.
His forthcoming book Philosophy of Social Science: Toward Pragmatism (Polity Press, 2005) explores the relevance
of American Pragmatism for contemporary philosophy of social science. His pragmatist perspective explores how various
types of social research aim at self-referential knowledge: rather than aiming to represent or predict an external realm,
this type of research uses the encounter with difference to re-describe our own culture and to re-assess our own presuppositions.
Examples of this research can be found in sociology, history, archaeology and anthropology.
Patrick Baert’s previous publications include:
Social Theory in the Twentieth Century (Polity Press, 1998); and
Time, Self and Social Being (Ashgate, 1992).
He is a member of the Executive Committee of the European Sociological Association and the Coordinator of the Social
Theory Network of the same organisation. He held various visiting positions abroad; for instance, at the Université
Libre de Bruxelles (as holder of ‘la Chaire Internationale Henri Janne’), the University of British Columbia, the
Université de Paris IV Sorbonne and the Humboldt Universität Berlin.
Ted Honderich, called Britain's foremost radical philosopher, is internationally distinguished for more than his
political philosophy. He has been Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London,
and a visiting professor at Yale and the City University of New York. His theory of the nature of perceptual
consciousness — Consciousness as Existence — is a nearly-physicalist
alternative to recent orthodoxy in the philosophy of mind.
His publications include:
A short book on determinism, How Free Are You?, a summary of A Theory of Determinism: The Mind,
Neuroscience and Life-Hopes, is the most translated book on the subject.
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, a very widely used single-volume reference work on the subject,
has lately come out in a new edition.
Three volumes of his papers have also appeared.
His most recent book After the Terror caused controversy in Germany and elsewhere for its moral
defence of Palestinian terrorism against ethnic cleansing. It was banned by one German publisher and then
brought out again by another.
Ted Honderich is also the author of a philosophical autobiography, Philosopher: A Kind of Life.
Jeffrey T. Schnapp occupies the Rosina Pierotti Chair of Italian Studies at Stanford, where he is chairman
of the French and Italian Department as well as the founder/director of the Stanford Humanities Laboratory.
The author of ten books and over one hundred essays in four languages, his work has appeared in reviews such as:
Critical Inquiry, Representations, South Atlantic Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary History, Merkur, Intersezioni, Veredas and Lugar Comum.
His four most recent books are:
A Primer of Italian Fascism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000);
Gaetano Ciocca. Costruttore, inventore, agricoltore, scrittore (Milan: Skira, 2000);
Vedette fiumane. L'occupazione vista e vissuta da Madeleine Witherspoon Dent Gori-Montanelli,
crocerossina americana, e da Francesco Gori-Montanelli, Capo del Genio e del reparto fotografico (Venice: Marsilio Editore, 2000); and
Hugo Ball/Jonathan Hammer, Ball and Hammer (Tenderenda the Fantast), edited and introduced by Jeffrey T. Schnapp, (New Haven: Yale, 2001).
He is currently at work on a cultural history of Western ideas about driving and individualism, entitled
Crash (An Anthropology of Speed) while at the same time directing a Stanford Humanities Laboratory
pilot project entitled Crowds, dedicated to tracing the rise and fall of the revolutionary crowd
from 1789 through the 1970's.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a cultural historian and media scholar, is the author of
Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity
(New York University Press, 2001), and The Anarchist in the Library (Basic Books, 2004).
Vaidhyanathan has written for many periodicals, including The Chronicle of Higher Education,
The New York Times Magazine, MSNBC.COM, Salon.com, openDemocracy.net, and The Nation.
After five years as a professional journalist, Vaidhyanathan earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University
of Texas at Austin. He has taught at Wesleyan University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison and is currently
an assistant professor of Culture and Communication at New York University. He lives in Greenwich Village, USA.
Masao Miyoshi is Hajime Mori Professor Emeritus of Literature at the
University of California, San Diego. Before he moved to San Diego, he
had been in the English Department at Berkeley for twenty three years.
He also taught at the University of Chicago and Harvard.
His publications range from Victorian Literature, the Japanese novel, and
Japanese history and culture. More recently he has been writing on
transnational corporatism, the modern university, and increasingly on
the environmental effects on the humanities discipline.
Jack Goody is a Fellow of St John's College and Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology in the
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.
He is the author of many books, among them The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977),
The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (1986). His recent books include
The European Family: An Historico-Anthropological Essay (2000) and
Food and Love: A Cultural History of East and West (1998).
