MELLON CDI INVITED FELLOWS MELLON CDI AT CRASSH
The activities and programmes of the Mellonfunded Centre for Disciplinary Innovation preserve and model the spirit of independent critical inquiry that has characterised the best research in the Humanities.
Thomas Lacqueur (Helen Fawcett Professor of History, UC Berkeley)
Human Rights Pedagogy and the Politics of Humanitarianism
Professor Thomas Laqueur’s lecture focused on negotiating the tensions between a legalistic and manifestly political account of human rights on the one hand, and the possibility of care for human welfare as a moral ideal on the other. The symposium opened with a discussion of his work in progress, The Deep Time of the Dead, addressing the cultural work that dead bodies do in particular times and places – late modern Europe – in relationship to timeless anthropological claims for the dead and to the sceptical tradition that dead bodies do not matter. The medieval historian, Professor Miri Rubin (QMUL), acted as respondent. Two panels addressing different aspects of Professor Laqueur’s work – Sex and Other Deaths and Death Work – included Professor John Forrester and Leon Rocha (HPS) and Maja PetrovicSteger (Social Anthropology), Jenny Wallace (English), and Professor Simon Goldhill (Classics). Their papers approached sex and death from perspectives that included Foucault, Chinese nei dan (internal alchemy), contemporary constructions of the dead body, the powerful presence of absent bodies, and counting the votes of the dead. The symposium concluded with an engaged interdisciplinary discussion and response by Professor Laqueur.
v events/1454 6
Cathy Caruth
(Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Comparative Literature and English, Emory)
After the End: Psychoanalysis in the Ashes of History
Professor Cathy Caruth’s lecture paid close textual attention to Derrida’s Archive Fever and to Freud’s essay on Jensen’s Gradiva, showing what they revealed about the relation between psychoanalysis and the historical legacy of the Holocaust including its archaeology and repression. The colloquium began with Professor Caruth’s presentation of her paper Lying and History. The reports on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction determined that the US invasion of Iraq could start. Today, she argued, we know to justify the Iraq war. Discussing Hannah Arendt and
the Vietnam War, Professor Caruth demonstrated that this type of political imagery has a long tradition in the US. Responding, Professor Raymond Guess (Philosophy) and Waseem Yaqoob (POLIS) argued for different understandings of both lying and Arendt’s work from their respective disciplinary perspectives. The second panel brought together participants from Cambridge and UEA to discuss Caruth’s work under the heading of Trauma, Refugee Studies, and Literature. Lucia Ruprecht (German) addressed cultural fantasies of the virtuoso in relation to trauma, while Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge and Ross Wilson (UEA) respectively focused on Arendt and refugee speech, and on the problem of ‘overliving’ in Shelley’s writing as forms of departure into life. The panels produced a rich and lively discussion to which Professor Caruth gave v events/1515 and events/1528
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28