Visiting Speakers

Andrew Sabl is a political theorist whose research focuses on political ethics; democratic and constitutional theory; theories of toleration and political pluralism, and, most recently, the political theory of David Hume and questions of leadership and coordination. Sabl's research combines an interest in historical and contemporary political theory and ethics with a focus on live questions of politics and policy. His first book Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2002) attempted to discuss systematically, through both theory and biographical examples, the range of political action that takes place, and ought to take place, in a pluralistic, constitutional democracy such as the United States, and the range of character dispositions required in the leaders who facilitate each type of action. This theme of moral pluralism in politics has run throughout his early work. 

Catriona Sandilands' broad work is concerned with environmental cultural studies, environmental/ecological literary criticism, environmental writing, queer ecologies, ecological feminisms, nature and environment in social and political thought, and everyday human/plant relations, vegetality, and botanical biopolitics. Since her appointment to the faculty of York University in 1994, she has considered her primary task as a teacher, writer, and researcher to be the cultivation of the “plurality” of which Hannah Arendt writes so eloquently.

Mihály Sárkány studied ethnology and history at the University of Budapest in the 1960s and became a research fellow in the Institute of Ethnology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1968 and was the head of its non-European department from 1988 to his retiring in 2013. After it he has remained attached to this institution as its senior honoris causa. He also lectured at the University of Budapest on sociocultural anthropological theories, on economic and social anthropology from 1973 to 2010.

Carol Seigel is the Director of the Freud Museum, London. She studied history at Cambridge University and at Birkbeck, University of London. She has worked in museums in London for nearly twenty years, including as Curator of Social History at the Jewish Museum and running public programmes at the Museum of London. She has been the Director of the Freud Museum since 2009.

Dr. Shankar examines British colonialism, cross-cultural encounters, and the making of social difference and inequality in West Africa, particularly Nigeria, a nation that has experienced considerable religious violence in recent years.

Michal Shapira is an Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer) of History and Gender Studies at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War and Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2013). She had previously taught at Barnard College, Columbia University as an ACLS New Faculty Fellow and at Amherst College as a Visiting Assistant Professor. 

Bernhard Siegert is Gerd Bucerius Professor of History and Theory of Cultural Techniques at the Faculty of Media of the Bauhaus-University Weimar. He studied German, Philosophy, General and Comparative Linguistics, Jewish studies and history at the Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg and gained his PhD in 1991 at the Ruhr-University Bochum. From 1993 to 1998 he was a research assistant at the chair of aesthetics and history of the media of the Institute of Culture and Art Science at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

P. W. Singer is the director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program. Singer’s research focuses on three core issues: current U.S. defense needs and future priorities, the future of war and the future of the U.S. defense system. Singer lectures frequently to U.S. military audiences and is the author of several books and articles, including Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.