Visiting Speakers

Riccardo Viale is Full Professor of Methodology of Social Sciences at the Faculty of Sociology of the University of Milano-Bicocca; from 2002 until 2009 he was also Professor of Cognitive Economics and of Research and Innovation Policy at the Scuola Superiore della Pubblica Amministrazione of Roma (SSPA) where he was also Scientific Director of the Master on “Decisional Processes in the Public Administration” and Scientific Director of the 2nd Master on “Science, Technology, and Innovation.”

Maurizio Viroli is Professor of Political Theory within the Department of Politics and associated faculty within the Department of History at Princeton University. He is Director of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies at the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Switzerland, where he is full professor of Political Communication.

Dr. Shelley Weinberg is currently an assistant professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois. In 2008, she received her Ph.D  from the University of Toronto. Following this, she received the UIUC Humanities Released Time Fellowship in 2012, then the American College of Learned Societies Fellowship in 2013. Professor Weinberg has written extensively about the philosopher John Locke, specifically honing in on consciousness and skepticism. Her most recent publication, "Locke's Reply to the Skeptic", published in 2013, is situated on this very topic.

Cornel West is a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual. He is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton. He has taught at Union Theological Seminary, Yale, Harvard and the University of Paris. He has written 19 books and edited 13 books. He is best known for his classic Race Matters, Democracy Matters, and his new memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud.

Kathleen Wilson is Professor of History and Cultural Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She publishes on the themes of British culture and empire, including The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (1995), which won prizes from the Royal Historical Society and the North American Conference on British Studies; The Island Race: Englishness Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (2003); and (as editor) A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660-1840 (2004).

Dr. Yale received her Ph.D. in the history of science from Harvard University.  She is especially interested in the history of communication technologies (from the alphabet to the Internet), British history, and the relationship between the development of science, ideas of nationhood, and commerce in the early modern world.

Dr. Young was appointed assistant professor at Rockefeller in 1978 as part of The Rockefeller University Fellows Program. He was named associate professor in 1984 and professor in 1988, and from 1987 to 1996 he was an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.