Visiting Speakers

Coming of age in Birmingham, Alabama during the social ferment of the civil rights era, the murder of two close childhood friends in the 1963 Sunday School bombing crystallized within Fania a passionate commitment to social transformation. For the next decades, she was active in the civil rights, Black liberation, women’s, prisoners’, peace, anti-racial violence and anti-apartheid movements. After receiving her law degree from University of California, Berkeley in 1979, Fania practiced almost 27 years as a civil rights trial lawyer.

William Deringer is Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his doctorate in the History of Science from Princeton University, where his research focused on the history of economic knowledge. From 2012 -'15, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, before joining the MIT faculty in 2015.

Laurent Dubois is Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History and at Duke University, Director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies, and Co-Director of the Haiti Lab at the Franklin Humanities Institute. He is a specialist on the history and culture of the French Caribbean, particularly Haiti and Guadeloupe, as well as of the broader Afro-Atlantic World. Dubois is an aspiring expert in the emerging fields of Thuramology and Zidanology, and the creator and editor of the Soccer Politics Blog.

Daniel Edelstein works for the most part on eighteenth-century France, with research interests at the crossroads of literature, history, political theory, and digital humanities.

Soffiyah Elijah is the Executive Director of the Correctional Association of New York. An accomplished advocate, attorney, scholar and educator, Ms. Elijah is the first woman and the first person of color to lead the nearly 170-year old organization in its mission to create a fairer, more effective and humane criminal justice system.

François Ewald recently retired as professor of insurance at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (Paris) and as director of the Ecole Nationale d’Assurances (Paris). His research interests are in the fields of risk and the philosophy of risk, and his publications include L’Etat providence (1986), and Le Principe de precaution (2001, 2008).

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice Emeritus at Princeton where he was a member of the faculty for 40 years. Since 2002 he has been Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  

One of the most influential cartoonists in the last half of the 20th century, Jules Feiffer has won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartoons (1986), an Academy Award for animation for his animated short, "Munro" (1961), and had his first play “Little Murders” chosen by London’s “Royal Shakespeare Company as it’s first American production (1967), where it won the Best Foreign Play of the Year Award.