Visiting Speakers

April Bernard is the Director of Creative Writing and an Associate Professor at Skidmore College. Her first book, Blackbird Bye Bye (Random House, 1989), was chosen by Amy Clampitt as the winner of the 1989 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.  Her other acclaimed books of poetry include: Romanticism (W. W. Norton, 2009); Swan Electric (2002); Psalms (1995). She is also the author of a novel, Pirate Jenny (W. W. Norton, 1990).

Jay Bernstein is an American philosopher, and University Distinguished Professor at The New School. He received a BA from Trinity College in 1970 and graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a PhD in 1975. Bernstein is an expert in Continental philosophy and a leading interpreter of the philosophy of Adorno.

Now teaching at the ITAM School of Law in Mexico, Dr. Bertomeu has taught and held conferences worldwide.

Stephen Best is an Associate Professor of English at UC-Berkeley. Professor Best is an alumni of Williams College (B.A., 1989) and the University of Pennsylvania (M.A., 1992; Ph.D., 1997). He is the author of The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (University of Chicago, 2004), a study of property, poetics, and legal hermeneutics in nineteenth-century American literary and legal culture. Currently, he is working on a new project on rumor, promiscuous speech, and slavery's archive.

Timothy Bewes is a Professor of English at Brown University. Bewes's writing and research have turned away from questions focused on the "politics of literature," and have begun instead to address the categories that are presupposed in that relation: not only "politics" and "literature" themselves (and closely-related categories such as "ethics" and "aesthetics"), but more basic concepts such as the contemporary, perception, subjectivity, the event, the frame, materiality, the body, and reading. His current project is a theoretical analysis of the contemporary novel.

Rens Bod, professor at University of Amsterdam, is the author of the recently published A New History of the Humanities (Oxford UP, 2013). Since 2008, he has organized the biennial conference “The Making of the Humanities” and co-edited the resulting book series on The Making of the Humanities, Vols. 1, 2 and 3 (Amsterdam UP, 2010/12/14). He is a founding editor of the journal History of Humanities, launched in October 2014 (U. Chicago Press).

Linda Bosniak is Distinguished Professor of Law at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She is the author of The Citizen and The Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton University Press, 2006), and many chapters and articles on immigration, citizenship, nationalism, equality and globalization. 

Caroline Brettell is the University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Ruth Collins Altshuler Director of the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute at Southern Methodist University. She has spent her career studying the immigrant populations in Europe, Canada, and the United States (most recently in the DFW area). Her particular and most current interests are in the gendered aspects of migration, issues of identity and citizenship, and the relationship between immigrants and cities.