Visiting Speakers

Nancy Henry is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research focuses on Victorian literature, and particularly on nineteenth-century views of finance, colonialism, and imperialism. She has written three books on the life and context of George Eliot, the most recent one being The Life of George Eliot. Blackwell Critical Biography Series.

Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has published widely in the history of religion in Europe and the U.S., on the Holocaust and its aftermath, and on the histories of gender and sexuality.

Stephen Holmes’s research centers on premodern constitutionalism, the history of European liberalism, the disappointments of democracy and economic liberalization after Communism, and the difficulty of combating international Salafi terrorism within the bounds of the Constitution and the rule of law. In 1988, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a study of the theoretical foundations of liberal democracy. He was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2003-05 for his work on Russian legal reform.

Terry Hong is a writer and arts consultant, specializing in books, theater, and film. She created and maintains Smithsonian BookDragon, a multiculti book review blog for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. She is currently an Advisor for 10x10: Educate Girls, Change the World, a global action campaign highlighting girls’ education; she served as the Literary Coordinator for the groundbreaking film, Girl Rising. She co-authored two books, Eastern Standard Time: A Guide to Asian Influence on American Culture from Astro Boy to Zen Buddhism and What Do I Read Next? Multicultural Literature.

Gerald N. Izenberg is a professor of history at Washington University. Izenberg joined Washington University in 1976, and became a professor in 1991. He also helped create the Program in Literature and History and co-directed it from 1977 to 2004. He received a bachelor's degree from University College, University of Toronto in 1961, and a master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University in 1962 and 1968, respectively. Additionally, he studied in Zurich and received a certificate in psychoanalysis from the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1995, Izenberg received a diploma from the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute. Since then, he has been active in the St. Louis institute, as a member and as a president, serving from 2003 - 2005. A three-time recipient of the Teaching Award in the Humanities at Washington University, given by students, Izenberg has also been recognized with a Distinguished Faculty Award in 1996.

Sean Jacobs is a scholar of media and international affairs. He was born and grew up in apartheid South Africa. Dr. Jacobs has held fellowships at Harvard University, New York University, and The New School for Social Research. He has worked as a political analyst at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa in Cape Town and as a journalist. From 2005 to 2009, he was an assistant professor of Afroamerican and African studies and communication studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Dr. Jacobs has contributed articles to The Nation, The Guardian, Mail & Guardian, and The National.

Laurent Jeanpierre is university professor of Political Science at the Universite Paris 8. His areas of interest include sociology and political sociology of the transnational corporation, sociology and political sociology of intellectuals worlds, sociology of revolutions and political crises, as well as neoliberalism.

Morten Jerven is an economic historian, with a PhD from the London School of Economics, and has been working at the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada since 2009.