Visiting Speakers

Philip Mirowski is Carl Koch Professor of Economics and the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame. Professor Mirowski has written numerous books including More Heat than Light, Machine Dreams and, most recently Science-Mart.

Samuel Moyn is professor of law and history at Harvard University. He earned a doctorate in modern European history from the University of California-Berkeley in 2000 and a law degree from Harvard Law School in 2001.

As a political ecologist trained in geography's nature-society tradition, I seek to explain relationships between the material world (microbes, crops, and economies) and the way people understand that world (as mitigated through institutions, culture, and experience).  In particular, I research the interactions among local people and government or development workers, as well as between people and non-human actors like crops, nutrients, and witchcraft. This approach reveals that by paying attention to, for example, the addition of beetroot to gardens and cooking pots, the abandonment of long-standing healing rituals, and the failure of anti-tuberculosis campaigns, we can understand how local people and places shape state and international development initiatives.  In my research, I use a mix of methods including oral history collection, ethnography, household surveys, focus groups, participatory GIS, and archival research to understand local thinking and practices.  To understand non-human actors, I use epidemiological and ecological data and scientific work (with a critical eye to the social production of that work)

Geoffrey O’Brien is Editor in Chief of the Library of America. His latest books are Early Autumn and The Fall of the House of Walworth.

Bob Perelman has published over 15 volumes of poetry, most recently The Future of Memory (Roof Books) and Ten to One: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press). His critical focus is on poetry and modernism, with his major books being The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton University Press) and The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (University of California Press). He has edited Writing/Talks (Southern Illinois University Press), a collection of talks by poets. Modernism the Morning After is forthcoming from Alabama UP; he is working on a new book of poems, Jack and Jill.

Robert Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought, Philosophy, and in the College at the University of Chicago.

Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.

Richard A. Shweder is a cultural anthropologist and the William Claude Reavis Distinguished Service Professor of Human Development at the University of Chicago.