Professor Peter Gratton, Memorial University of Newfoundland Hatfield College January – March 2014


Peter Gratton is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University of Newfoundland. His philosophical research brings together and critically engages post-Kantian continental philosophy alongside the history of metaphysics and theories of race and racialization.


Professor Gratton completed his doctorate in 2007 on the history of sovereignty, in particular concerning its links to nationalism in modernity. This work was much updated and became the basis for The State of Sovereignty: Lessons from the Political Fictions of Modernity (SUNY Press, 2012), where he engaged critically with Agamben’s reading of the history of thought over and against Arendt, Foucault, and Derrida’s particular readings of the history of the concept of sovereignty. He has published in such journals as Philosophy Today, European Legacy, and Telos, and from 2007 to 2010 was an editor for Radical Philosophy Review, and is the editor of several books in contemporary Continental philosophy.


Gratton’s work on the metaphysics of sovereignty and its legacy in a certain theological conception of time led to his current work on immanence and time. In part, this work is driven by Jean-Luc Nancy’s call for a “trans-immmanence” and its relation to temporality. This interest meant also confronting the recent movement of speculative realism, which provided the basis for his manuscript, Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects (Continuum, 2013).


In 2012, Professor Gratton was a Research Fellow in the Humanities Centre at Australia National University, where he completed his work on speculative realism, and continued writing his manuscript on Time: Neither Transcendence nor Immanence.


At the IAS, Peter plans to continue this work by thinking of the motifs of light that pervade considerations of transcendence in the tradition dating to Plato and Plotinus.


Dr Norman Kleiman, Columbia University Trevelyan College January – March 2014


Dr Norman J. Kleiman works at the intersection of public health, radiation research and ophthalmology, often using the eye as a model system to study the effects of environmental exposures, and ionizing radiation in particular, on human health.


He has contiguous funding from NASA, and the Department of Energy. This funded research is directed towards understanding how exposure to small amounts of low- LET radiation, like X-rays, or high energy space radiation, causes cataracts in animal models. Other research estimates relative risk of radiation cataract in medical workers such as interventional cardiologists and associated nursing personnel following occupational exposure to X-ray.


A collaborative study with Ukrainian colleagues examines radiation risk in Chernobyl accident clean-up workers, and a NIEHS funded project investigates the potential relationship between arsenic exposure and eye pathology. Dr Kleiman also studies how radiation or other environmental stresses cause DNA damage that leads to disease and how individual genetic determinants influence risk.


His recent work with respect to arsenicals impacts another key world environmental health issue – namely the effect of water contamination on human health. Both areas of research are receiving greater recognition in line with the increasing importance associated with diminishing resources (water and energy).


Dr Kleiman is currently President of the Board for Fight for Sight USA; is a technical cooperation expert for the International Atomic Energy Agency and serves on scientific committees of the National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP) and the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP). He is U.S. Director for the Ukrainian American Chernobyl Ocular Study (UACOS).


While in Durham Dr Kleiman will contribute to the IAS subtheme of Light for Health and Wellbeing and particularly the activities involved in Sensing Light and Light Responses.


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