Visiting Speakers

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of WALKAWAY, a novel for adults, a YA graphic novel called IN REAL LIFE, the nonfiction business book INFORMATION DOESN’T WANT TO BE FREE, and young adult novels like HOMELAND, PIRATE CINEMA and LITTLE BROTHER and novels for adults like RAPTURE OF THE NERDS and MAKERS. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, is a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.

My project examines the reception of the mechanical view of nature in the German Enlightenment in the backdrop of the continuing influence of late Scholastic metaphysics. This research reveals doctrinal continuities between seventeenth century Lutheran Scholastics such as Christoph Scheibler and Johann Clauberg and eighteenth century proponents of mechanistic science such as Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant as they attempt to reconcile the success of the new physics with traditional conceptions of order and design in nature. Pressure from the new mathematical physics leads authors in this tradition to reconfigure rather than abandon the Aristotelian model of causal explanation. By Kant’s time, for example, teleological explanation shifts from a concern with how the end state of a process explains its occurrence, to how a whole determines its parts. Mediating such shifts is the preservation in early modern Germany of two Scholastic theses bearing on natural teleology: the first is the “convertibility thesis”, which denies a sharp distinction between being and the good, facts and values; the second holds that explanations involving ends or purposes presuppose rational agency.

Daniel Harkett earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Edinburgh and his PhD from Brown University. After completing a post-doctoral fellowship in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University, he taught at the Rhode Island School of Design for almost a decade. Recently he moved to Colby College, where he is an associate professor in the Art Department.

National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of French and Italian. (Ph.D. in French, The Johns Hopkins University, 1979). Seventeenth-century French literature and philosophy; modern and post-modern aesthetics.

Eric Klinenberg is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the author of Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (The Penguin Press, 2012), Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media (Metropolitan Books, 2007), and Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2002), as well as the editor of Cultural Production in a Digital Age and of the journal Public Culture. His scholarly work has been published in journals including the American Sociological Review, Theory and Society, and Ethnography, and he has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Time Magazine, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The Washington Post, Slate, Le Monde Diplomatique, The London Review of Books, and the radio program, This American Life.

Hisham Matar is the author of two novels and a memoir. The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (2016) won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography, the PEN America Book of the Year Award, and the Rathbones Folio Prize. The Return was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and shortlisted for the Costa Awards, and was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and the Financial Times. The memoir tells of his father’s kidnapping when Matar was 19 and studying in London: one of the Qaddafi regime’s most prominent opponents in exile, his father was held in a secret prison in Libya and Hisham would never see him again. And yet The Return is an uplifting memoir; Matar recounts his journey home to Libya in search of the truth behind his father’s disappearance; he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. “Hope,” as he writes, “is cunning and persistent.”

Professor Montaldo specializes in modern Latin American cultures. She has published Museo del consumo. Archivos de la cultura de masas en la Argentina (2016), Rubén Darío. Viajes de un cosmopolita extremo (FCE, 2013), Zonas ciegas. Populismos y experimentos culturales en Argentina (2010), A propriedade da Cultura (2004), Teoría crítica, teoría cultural (2001), Ficciones culturales y fábulas de identidad en América Latina (1999), La sensibilidad amenazada (1995), and De pronto el campo (1993). She is co-editor of The Argentina Reader: History, Culture and Politics (2002), Esplendores y miserias del siglo XIX (1996) and Yrigoyen entre Borges y Arlt (1989). She has published journal articles in Latin America, the United States, and Europe on Independence writers, Latin American fin-de-siècle, modern culture, contemporary literature, as well as culture industry and institutions in Latin America.

Intisar A. Rabb is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a director of its Islamic Legal Studies Program. She also holds an appointment as a Professor of History at Harvard University and as a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She previously served as an Associate Professor at NYU Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and at NYU Law School, and as an Assistant Professor at Boston College Law School; and she teaches courses in criminal law, legislation and theories of statutory interpretation, and Islamic law. She also served as a law clerk for Judge Thomas L. Ambro of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, as a Temple Bar Fellow in London with the American Inns of Court, and as a 2010 Carnegie Scholar for her work on contemporary Islamic law reform. In 2015, she received awards from the Luce Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation for SHARIAsource – an online portal for content and context on Islamic law, designed to make available primary sources as well as informed scholarly commentary about them freely available in collaboration with other legal scholars. She has published on Islamic law in historical and modern contexts, including the monograph, Doubt in Islamic Law (Cambridge University Press 2015), the edited volumes, Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts (with Abigail Balbale, ILSP/HUP, 2017) and Law and Tradition in Classical Islamic Thought (with Michael Cook et al., Palgrave 2013), and numerous articles on Islamic constitutionalism, on Islamic legal canons of constructions, and on the early history of the Qur'an text. She received a BA from Georgetown University, a JD from Yale Law School, and an MA and PhD from Princeton University. She has conducted research in Egypt, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere.