Visiting Speakers

Lewis R. Gordon is an Afro-Jewish philosopher, political thinker, educator, and musician (drums, other percussive instruments, and piano), who was born on the island of Jamaica and grew up in the Bronx, New York. He attended Lehman College under the Lehman Scholars Program (LSP) where he graduated with honors in philosophy and political science as a member of the Chi chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Gordon’s research in philosophy is in Africana philosophy, philosophy of existence, phenomenology, social and political philosophy, philosophy of culture, aesthetics, philosophy of education, and philosophy of science. He is a professor of Africana Philosophy, Existentialism, Phenomenology, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, World Philosophy, and Philosophy of Education at UConn.

James Grande completed his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Oxford, where he was a research assistant on the Leverhulme-funded Godwin Diary Project and wrote his doctoral thesis on the radical journalist William Cobbett. He joined King’s in 2011 as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow to work on the politics and aesthetics of religious dissent. Between 2014 and 2016 he was a postdoctoral research fellow on the ERC project Music in London, 1800-1851.  His research is focused on the politics and print culture of the Romantic period. His first monograph, William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England: Radicalism and the Fourth Estate, 1792-1835 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) offers a new interpretation of Cobbett as a Burkean radical whose writing cuts across the ‘revolution controversy’ of the 1790s, combining Thomas Paine’s common sense and transatlantic radicalism with Edmund Burke’s emphasis on tradition, patriotism and the domestic affections.

Ethan Greenbaum is a New York based artist. Selected exhibition venues include KANSAS, New York; Derek Eller Gallery, New York; Hauser and Wirth, New York; Marlborough Chelsea, New York, Higher Pictures, New York; Marianne Boesky, New York, Circus Gallery, Los Angeles; Steve Turner, Los Angeles; The Suburban, Chicago; Michael Jon & Alan, Miami, The Aldrich Museum, Connecticut; and Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City. His work has been discussed in The New York Times, Modern Painters, Artforum, BOMB Magazine, ArtReview and Interview Magazine, among others.  Greenbaum is the recipient of Dieu Donne’s Workspace Residency, LMCC’s Workspace Program, The Robert Blackburn SIP Fellowship, The Socrates EAF Fellowship, The Edward Albee Foundation Residency and The Barry Schactman Painting Prize. He received an MFA in Painting from Yale School of Art. Recent projects include a solo presentation with Lyles & King at the 2017 Armory Show and exhibitions at Stems Gallery, Brussels and Galerie Pact, Paris. Forthcoming projects include and a solo exhibition with Super Dakota, Brussels and a solo exhibition with Lyles & King, New York.

Frank A. Guridy holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and specializes in sport history, urban history, and the history of the African Diaspora in the Americas. He is the author of Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), which won the Elsa Goveia Book Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians and the Wesley-Logan Book Prize, conferred by the American Historical Association. He is also the co-editor of Beyond el Barrio: Everyday Life in Latino/a America (NYU Press, 2010), with Gina Pérez and Adrian Burgos, Jr. His articles have appeared in the Radical History Review, Caribbean Studies, Social Text, and Cuban Studies. His fellowships and awards include the Scholar in Residence Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award from the University of Texas at Austin. In 2014-15 he held the Ray A. Billington Professorship in American History at Occidental College and the Huntington Library. He is currently at work on two book projects: Assembly in the Fragmented City: A History of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and When Texas Sports Became Big Time: A History of Sports in Texas after World War II (under contract with the University of Texas Press).

David Hajdu is the music critic for The Nation and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Before joining The Nation in January 2015, he served for more than ten years as the music critic for The New Republic. He is currently at work on a "fictional work of nonfiction," a biography of a nonexistent songwriter. He is also completing the libretto for a music-performance piece about Orson Welles. Hajdu is the author of four books of nonfiction and one collection of essays: Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (1996), Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña (2001), The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America (2008), Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (2009), and Love for Sale: Pop Music in America (Fall 2016).

Catherine Hall's research focuses on re-thinking the relation between Britain and its empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is particularly interested in the ways in which empire impacted upon metropolitan life, how the empire was lived 'at home', and how English identities, both masculine and feminine, were constituted in relation to the multiple 'others' of the empire. Civilising Subjects looks at the process of mutual constitution, both of colonizer and colonized, in England and Jamaica in the period between the 1830s and the 1860s. Catherine's recent book, Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (2012), focuses on the significance of the Macaulays, father and son, in defining the parameters of nation and empire in the early nineteenth century.

Yannis Hamilakis is Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Modern Greek Studies at Brown University. He works on the archaeology of the senses, on the politics of the past, on archaeological ethnography, on colonial and national archaeology, and on the links between the photographic and the archaeological. He also co-directs the Koutroulou Magoula Archaeology and Archaeological Ethnography Project in Greece.

Phil Harper is a literary scholar and cultural critic concerned primarily with twentieth-century American fiction, and with aspects of lived experience in the contemporary United States, including the negotiation of racial, gender, and sexual identities, and various modes of mass-cultural production, circulation, and consumption.