Visiting Speakers

Mira Nair began her artistic career as an actor before turning her attention to film. She has found success as a documentary filmmaker, winning awards for So Far From India and India Cabaret. In 1988, Nair’s debut feature, Salaam Bombay!, was nominated for an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It also won the Camera D'Or (for best first feature) and the Prix du Publique (for most popular entry) at the Cannes Film Festival as well as 25 other international awards.  

Gloria Origgi's work focuses on issues of social epistemology, philosophy of social science and philosophy of new technologies. She is particularly interested in the relation between knowledge and society. Her latest books are on trust (VRIN 2008) and reputation (Seuil 2013) and she's writing a new book on the epistemology of reputation and the massive use of rankings in democratic societies.

Professor Parathasarathi joined the Boston College in the fall of 1998. He teaches courses on modern South Asia and the British Empire. He has recently completed a book on the economic and social history of eighteenth-century South India, and he is now engaged in a comparative study of economic development in eighteenth-century Eurasia.

Born in Naples, Italy, Pasquale Pasquino is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Centre de Théorie du Droit, Paris (CNRS). He obtained a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Classics from the University of Naples and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Paris I - Sorbonne. Dr. Pasquino has been working in different research and teaching institutions, notably the Collège de France; Ecole Normale Supérieure; Université de Paris I, Sorbonne; Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Paris; Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte, Göttingen; Universität Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany; King's College, Cambridge; The University of Chicago; and the Universities of Turin and Rome I, Italy. Since 1995, he has been a Visiting Professor at NYU in the Politics Department and in the Global Law School Program.

Jonathan Petropoulos (born January 10, 1961) is an American historian who writes about National Socialism and, in particular, the fate of art looted during World War II. He is John V. Croul Professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. Before his 1999 appointment to Claremont McKenna College, Petropoulos taught at Loyola College in Maryland. From 1998 to 2000, Petropoulos served as Research Director for the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets, chaired by Edgar Bronfman, Sr.. Since 2000, Petropoulos has served as an expert witness in several legal cases concerning Nazi-looted assets, including Altmann v. Austria (six paintings by Klimt, including Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I), Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum (painting by Pissarro), Kann v. Wildenstein (medieval manuscripts), and Rosner et al. v. U.S.A. (the Hungarian Gold Train case).

Professor Phillips is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Silverchest (2013) and Double Shadow (2011), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Other books include Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006, a translation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes (2004), and Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (2004).

Born in the north-east of England in 1946, Tom Pickard is one of the most accomplished English poets writing today. At the age of 17 Pickard discovered the modernist poet, Basil Bunting, living only ten miles away from his home city of Newcastle. Pickard became apprenticed to Bunting’s economic poetic style, and their friendship helped to draw the ex-poet out of his retirement, and Bunting later wrote his masterpiece, Briggflatts.

Maria Portuondo's historical research focuses on early modern science and technology in Europe and Latin America.