Visiting Speakers

David J. Alworth is Assistant Professor of English and of History and Literature at Harvard University. His scholarship and teaching focus on modern and contemporary American literature, the history and theory of the novel, visual media, and methods of interpretation. Recent essays appear in New Literary History, Post45, American Literary History, Contemporary Literature, The Henry James Review, Public Books, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.  His first book, Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form (Princeton UP 2016), examines six sites––supermarkets, dumps, roads, ruins, asylums, and bomb shelters––that were crucial to post-WWII American literature and visual art. Site Reading received the Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Social Interaction from the Media Ecology Association. 

Annelies Andries (2011) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Music History. Her dissertation, “Modernizing Spectacle: the Opéra in Napoleon’s Paris” studies the role of this theater in the transition of Paris from being the capital of the Revolution to its “modern” urban identity. In particular, it examines the institution’s operas as multimedia events in which artists experimented with different ways to unite the operatic arts (text, music, ballet, and visuals) and explores how the artistic production and reception articulate changing conceptions of history, the religious sublime, and art as a didactic and political tool.

Elena Aronova received her Ph.D. in History and Science Studies at the University of California at San Diego in 2012, after earning a doctorate in Biology and History of Science from the Russian Academy of Science. She is a historian of science working on the history of environmental and evolutionary sciences in the twentieth century. She is interested in the ways in which scientific practices are affected by, and contribute to, social and political order. Her current project examines the history and politics of environmental archives during the Cold War. She also works on the history of “science studies” as it emerged in early Cold War as a politically relevant area of expertise, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Her current projects include Doing Things With Data: the Cold War Political Economy of Environmental Archives, Science and the Cultural Cold War: Thinking Science on the Opposite Sides of the Iron Curtain, and Following the Data of the International Geophysical Year: Visualizations. 

After graduating in philosophy (Paris 1) and in the history of science (EHESS), Elise Aurières started her Ph.D at the Université Pantheon-Sorbonne University under the supervision of Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Dominique Pestre. Her research focuses on the role of Alexandre Koyré in the institutionalization of the history of science in the United States. The goal is to understand how Koyré renewed the intellectual landscape that he discovered in the US in the early 1940s, and how a number of American historians and philosophers appropriated his ideas in their efforts to professionalize the history of science in the United States.

JEFFREY ANDREW BARASH is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Amiens,  France. His publications have focused on the themes of political philosophy, historicism and modern German thought. He has served as Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Bielefeld, Ernst Cassirer Gastprofessor at the University of Hamburg, Lady Davis Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Hans-Georg Gadamer Professor at Boston College and Max Planck Fellow at the University of Konstanz. He is currently completing a book entitled “Collective Memory and the Historical Past” and is also preparing a work on the theme “What is a Political Myth?”

Josh Bell is the author of No Planets Strike and Alamo Theory. A recent recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, he has taught at Columbia University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and elsewhere, and is currently Briggs Copeland Lecturer on English at Harvard University.

David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions in the department of History at Princeton. He is a historian of early modern France, whose particular interest is the political culture of the Old Regime and the French Revolution.

Eliza Bent is a playwright and performer based in Brooklyn, NY. Bent is a 2017 New Georges Audrey Resident, a 2016 SPACE on Ryder Farm Working Farm resident writer, a MacDowell Colony fellow, a 2016 Target Margin Institute Fellow, a Bay Area Playwrights Finalist, a New Georges affiliated artist, and an alum of Project Y Playwright’s Group and TerraNova’s Groundbreakers group. Bent is a former senior editor at American Theatre magazine, where she still writes, a frequent performer with the Obie-award winning company Half Straddle, and an adjunct lecturer at Brooklyn College where she received an MFA in playwriting. Her works include Real Talk / Kip Talk (Abrons), On a Clear Day I Can See to Elba (New Ohio’s ICE Factory), Toilet Fire (runs at Abrons Arts Center, the Brick and JACK, Time Out New York Critics’ Pick), The Beyonce (Breaking String Theatre, 2014 Payne Award for Outstanding Theatrical Event), Blue Wizard / Black Wizard (Incubator Arts Project / Other Forces 2014 festival), The Hotel Colors (Bushwick Starr, L magazine’s 25 best stage shows of 2013), Karma Kharms (or yarns by Kharms) (Target Margin Lab at Bushwick Starr) and Pen Pals Meet (Iranian Theatre Festival at the Brick).