Visiting Speakers

Ben Kafka is an Associate Professor of Media Theory and History at NYU and a candidate psychoanalyst at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR-IPA). His first book, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Zone Books, 2012; French translation, Le démon de l'écriture, Éditions Zones Sensibles, 2013) investigates the historical, material, and unconscious origins of our conflicts with bureaucracy. He is currently working on a new project about forms of magical thinking under late capitalism and co-directing NYU's Interdisciplinary Freud Studies Group. He sees adult and adolescent patients at the IPTAR Clinical Center.

Shujaat Husain Khan is one of the greatest North Indian classical musicians of his generation. He belongs to the Imdad Khan gharana of the sitar and his style of playing sitar, known as the gayaki ang, is imitative of the subtleties of the human voice.

Joseph Koerner is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Art and Architecture of Harvard University and received the 2009 Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award.

Julilly Kohler-Hausmann is currently an assistant professor in the history department at Cornell University. She specializes in United States political and social history after World War II, more specifically, she explores the ways that politics and public policy intersect with gender, race and class inequality. In 2010-2011, Professor Kohler-Hausmann was a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies fellow. It was during this same time that she was a visiting scholar here at the Heyman Center for Humanities.

Hagar Kotef is Assistant Professor, Gender Studies at  Bar Ilan University and an affiliate of the Minerva Humanities Center, Tel Aviv University. She works on political theory, specializing in feminist theory, early liberal philosophy, women’s activism and contemporary continental philosophy.

Charles Larmore's work in moral and political philosophy has focused on such topics as the foundations of political liberalism, the nature of the self, and the nature of moral judgment.

Samuel Moyn is professor of law and history at Harvard University. He earned a doctorate in modern European history from the University of California-Berkeley in 2000 and a law degree from Harvard Law School in 2001.

Purvi Parikh is an established 'Khayal' singer of the Kirana Gharana.