Visiting Speakers

Professor Arjun Appadurai is currently Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University in New York City, NY.  

Leo Bersani is a literary theorist and Professor Emeritus of French at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in 19th- and 20th-century literature, psychoanalysis and literature, literature and the visual arts, and cultural criticism.  

James R. Brennan is an Assistant Professor in the History Department and African Studies Department at the University of Illinoies, Urbana-Champaign focusing on Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Political History of Tanzania and Kenya.

Dipesh Chakrabarty holds a B.Sc (Physics Honors) degree from Presidency College, University of Calcutta, a Post-graduate Diploma in Management (considered equivalent to MBA) from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and a Ph.D. (History) from the Australian National University. He is currently the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College.

Carolyn Dean is the John Hay Professor of International Studies and Interim Director for the Waston Institute for International Studies at Brown University.  

Lee Edelman is a professor and chair of the English Department at Tufts University.

Catherine Hall's research focuses on re-thinking the relation between Britain and its empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is particularly interested in the ways in which empire impacted upon metropolitan life, how the empire was lived 'at home', and how English identities, both masculine and feminine, were constituted in relation to the multiple 'others' of the empire. Civilising Subjects looks at the process of mutual constitution, both of colonizer and colonized, in England and Jamaica in the period between the 1830s and the 1860s. Catherine's recent book, Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (2012), focuses on the significance of the Macaulays, father and son, in defining the parameters of nation and empire in the early nineteenth century.

Jim Hoberman is the senior film critic for the Village Voice.