Visiting Speakers

Kimberly Johnson is a poet, translator, and literary critic. Her collections of poetry include Leviathan with a Hook, A Metaphorical God, and the forthcoming Uncommon Prayer. Her monograph on the poetic developments of post-Reformation poetry will be published in 2014. In 2009, Penguin Classics published her translation of Virgil’s Georgics. Her poetry, translations, and scholarly essays have appeared widely in publications including The New Yorker, Slate, The Iowa Review, Milton Quarterly, and Modern Philology.

Andreas Kalyvas works on democratic theory and the history of political ideas from ancient Greek and Roman to modern to contemporary continental political theory. In particular, my work focuses on the relationship between democracy and constitutionalism; problems of popular sovereignty, representation, and political autonomy; radical foundings, revolutionary breaks, and constitution making; the norm and the exception; emergency rule; citizenship and cosmopolitanism.

Keller's research focuses on the history and philosophy of modern biology and on gender and science. She is the author of several books, including A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (1983), Reflections on Gender and Science (1985), The Century of the Gene (2000), Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors and Machines (2002), and The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture (2010).

Award-winning filmmaker and journalist Alison Klayman is one of documentary film’s most exciting new talents. Her debut feature documentary, "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry", won critical acclaim and several top honors, including a Special Jury Prize at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, and an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Award, the highest accolade of broadcast journalism.   

Kleinzahler is Visiting Writer at Claremont-McKenna College and the author of ten books of poetry, including: The Strange Hours Travelers Keep (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize; Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club: Poems: 1975-1990 (2000); Green Sees Things in Waves (1999); and Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow (1995). He is also the author of one prose book, the meditative memoir Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004).

After graduate study at Berkeley, Jeffrey Knapp taught at Harvard for three years before returning to Berkeley in 1990. He chaired the Berkeley English department from 1996 to 1999 and received the campus’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2002.

Nicolas Langlitz was trained as a physician before conducting ethnographic and historical research on the revival of psychedelic research since the "Decade of the Brain" in two neuropsychopharmacology laboratories in Switzerland and California.

Raffaele Laudani is assistant professor in the Department of History and Human Cultures at the University of Bologna, where he teaches the History of Political Thought and Atlantic Studies.