Visiting Speakers

Daniel Swift ia an Assistant Professor of English of at Skidmore College. His most recent book is Shakespeare's Common Prayers (2012, Oxford Univeristy Press), a study of how Shakespeare’s plays reflect and reconfigure the Prayer Book’s language and theological tensions. His first book, Bomber County (2010, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux/Hamish Hamilton), traces the interstices between the bombers of the Royal Air Force, his grandfather's service before his death at the age of 30, and selected passages from other writers working during World War II.

Bjørn Thomassen is associate professor in the Department of Society and Globalization at Roskilde University. His research interests include urban studies, cultural and political dimensions of globalization, nationalism, identity & memory politics.

Professor Ticktin is is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the The New School for Social Research and former postdoc at the Society of Fellows at Columbia. She works at the intersections of the anthropology of medicine and science, law, and transnational and postcolonial feminist theory. Her research has focused in the broadest sense on what it means to make political claims in the name of a universal humanity: she has been interested in what these claims tell us about universalisms and difference, about who can be a political subject, on what basis people are included and excluded from communities, and how inequalities get instituted or perpetuated in this process.

Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University, Department of Romance Studies

Eleni Varikas is a University Lecturer in Political Science at Universite Paris 8. Her research topics include gender and modern political theory, difference plurality exclusion in universalistic legitimation systems, and hierarchical categorization. She serves on the editorial boards of Powers. French Review of Constitutional and Political Studies; Gender and History; Political Reasons; and Les Cahiers du Genre.

Jeremy Varon is an Associate Professor of History at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College, specializing in modern US history, European and American intellectual history, and German history. In 2004 he published Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (University of California Press).

Link-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton's Society of Fellows and an Assistant Professor in Sociology at Princeton University, Dr. Vertesi's is the author of Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars, scheduled for publication in 2015, and is co-author of Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited.She holds a Master's degree from Cambridge and a PhD from Cornell, has received several grants from the National Science Foundation, and was awarded the Hacker-Mullins prize for best graduate student paper from the American Sociological Association, Science, Knowledge and Technology section in 2007.

Dr. Brian Vick is Associate Professor of History at Emory University in Atlanta. He is the author of essays on German nationalism, historicism, and ideas of race, as well as of the books Defining Germany: The 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), and The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).