Visiting Speakers

J. Barton Scott is Assistant Professor of Historical Studies and the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Professor Beckert researches and teaches the history of the United States in the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the history of capitalism, including its economic, social, political and transnational dimensions. He just completed Empire of Cotton: A Global History, the first global history of the nineteenth century’s most important commodity.

Herman Bennett is a renowned scholar on the history of the African diaspora, with a particular focus on Latin American history. Through his work, he has called for scholars to broaden the critical inquiry of race and ethnicity in the colonial world. He has written extensively on the presence of African slaves and freedmen in Mexican society during the colonial period and on the consequent interaction between Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans in colonial Mexico.

Lawrence Blum is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Education and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His scholarly interests include race studies, moral philosophy, philosophy of education, social and political philosophy, moral psychology, multiculturalism, and philosophy and the Holocaust.

Professor Boone researches the novel as genre, gender and queer studies, narrative theory, and modernism. He is the author of four books: The Homoerotics of Orientalism (Columbia University Press, 2015), Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders, Go West and Generations (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 1998), and Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism (Routledge, 1990), and Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (U of Chicago Press, 1987).  

Fae (Fay) Brauer is Research Professor for Visual Art Theory, School of Cultural Studies and Creative Industries at the University of East London and Associate Professor in Art History and Cultural Theory at the University of New South Wales, Australia.

Jacqueline N. Brown’s research interests center on intersections of place, race and nation.  Her work treats place and other geographical phenomena as lenses through which to understand contemporary formations of race and nation. She also contributes to diaspora theory, feminist geography, and the anthropology of Black Europe.

Antoinette Burton is a Professor of History, Gender, and Women's Studies and the Interim Head of Sociology of at the University of Illinois. She researches 19th and 20th century Britain and its empire, with a speciality in colonial India and an ongoing interest in Australasia and Africa.