Visiting Speakers

Suzanne G. Cusick is a music historian and musicologist living in and working in New York City, where she is a Professor of Music at the Faculty of Arts and Science at the New York University. Her specialties are the music of seventeenth-century Italy, feminist approaches to music history and criticism, and queer studies in music.

Petrina Dacres is the Head of the Art History Department at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performance Art in Kingston, Jamaica.  She has served as a curator at the campus art gallery, the Cage, and at the National Museum, Jamaica and the National Gallery of Jamaica. 

Siddhartha Deb is the author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, and currently teaches at the New School.

Daniel Defert was Michel Foucault’s partner for more than the last 20 years of his life. A student during the early 1960s, he supported the Algerian liberation movement, participated in the activist Gauche prolétarienne and, together with Foucault, founded GIP (Groupe d’information sur les prisons), a group that gathered and published information about the conditions in French prisons.

Patricio del Real works on modern architecture and its transnational connections with a focus on Latin America, exploring the changing ideological maps and geographies of modernity, and the modes in which these cultural maps have been imagined and re-imagined as historians, critics and architects tell the story of modern architecture. His current book project examines how postwar politics and modern architecture came together at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and its Department of Architecture and Design to construct and transform the idea of Latin America. He co-edited the anthology, Latin American Modern Architectures: Ambiguous Territories (Routledge, 2012), and Taking Positions: Architects Write from Latin America, an anthology of original documents to be published in MoMA’s Documents series.   

David Dephy Gogibedashvili is the author of ten novels, four screenplays, and 12 collections of verse. His short story Before The End was chosen for inclusion in the anthology Best European Fiction 2012, edited by Aleksandar Hemon. Dephy’s first book-length work in English, the 2014 novel All the World’s Mysteries, is forthcoming in spring 2018 from Mad Hat Books in translation from the Georgian by Adam Smart.

Piersandra Di Matteo works as a freelance curator and theater theorist. Her research focuses on post-dramatic and performative theater formats as well as on contemporary philosophy and linguistics. At the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, she mainly researches the political and ethical dimension of the voice and also teaches directing there. She holds lectures at international conferences and often writes for scientific journals and other publications. Since 2008, she has been working as a dramaturge in close collaboration with Romeo Castellucci; for Inferno Purgatorio Paradiso , Parsifal , the installations Nothung und Dämmerung , Orphée et Eurydice ,Moses and Aaron and Jeanne d ' Arc au bûcher she worked with him. (As of 2017)

Maria DiBattista specializes in twentieth century literature and film, the European novel, and narrative theory.