NAOMI BECK
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 434
773-702-3466
nbeck@uchicago.edu
Naomi Beck received her PhD from the University of Paris-1 (Sorbonne-Pantheon)
in 2005. Her research focuses on the history of science in the broad cultural
context with an emphasis on the relationship between scientific ideas
and socio-political theories. She is currently revising her dissertation
entitled The Diffusion and Metamorphosis of Herbert Spencer's Evolutionary
Theories in France and Italy (a comparative study) for publication.
She is also working on a new study of the role played by evolutionary
ideas in 20th century economic theories, especially in the Chicago School
of Economics.
Curriculum Vitae
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GREG BECKETT
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 304
773-702-8562
beckett@uchicago.edu
Greg Beckett received his Ph.D. from the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago in 2008. His dissertation, "The End of Haiti: History Under Conditions of Impossibility," explores the cultural, historical, and political meanings of crisis in contemporary Haiti. His scholarly interests include the production of national histories centered around the concepts of crisis and revolution, environmental degradation and the collapse of the peasant economy in rural Haiti, the rise of urban gangs and garrison communities, and the failure of state institutions. Moving beyond the frequent designations of Haiti as a "crisis country," his research explores the ontological ground of the social experience of disjuncture and disintegration, with a focus on the relationship between the material destruction of the landscape and a politics of mourning that imagines the “end” or “death” of Haiti as a viable nation-state. Greg is currently working on a book manuscript based on his dissertation and on a series of articles exploring local responses to the US occupation of Haiti (1915-1934), the discourse on state failure and the use of international peacekeeping missions as a mode of emergency powers, and humanitarian crises and disaster response.
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CRAIG CARSON
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Wiessbourd Conference Coordinator, 2008-2009
Gates-Blake 302
773-702-3318
ccarson@uchicago.edu
In 2007, Craig Carson received his doctorate from the Department of Comparative
Literature at the University of California, Irvine. His dissertation,
“The Aesthetic Community: Eighteenth-Century Politics of the Spectacle,”
focuses on the intersection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aesthetic,
political and economic theory. While particularly concerned with the relation
of image and text in early liberal theory, his dissertation also addresses
the role of literary and medical texts in the reformation of eighteenth-century
British and French society. Craig is currently revising this project for
publication while teaching the course, Human Being and Citizen. His translation
of Katia Genel’s “The Question of Biopower: Foucault and Agamben” has
been published in Rethinking Marxism and an article on Bernard
Mandeville’s economic and medical work is forthcoming in an edition of
“Les Lumières Internationales.”
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ANITA CHARI
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 305
773-702-3481
anitac@uchicago.edu
Anita Chari completed her Ph.D in Political Science at the University of Chicago. Her primary area of specialization is in Political Theory, particularly in Western Marxism and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Her dissertation, "The Reification of the Political: Critical Theory and Postcapitalist Politics" is a study of the concept of reification as it has been used in the works of Karl Marx, Georg Lukacs, and Theodor Adorno. The dissertation uses the concept of reification as a way of addressing impasses in contemporary radical democratic theory by rethinking the relationship between the economy and the political in contemporary capitalism. She is currently preparing her dissertation for publication as a monograph. Her plans for future work include an article on political theory and radical pedagogy as well as further work in comparative political theory. Her work has appeared in Historical Materialism, Sartre Studies International and is forthcoming in Philosophy and Social Criticism. In addition to her work in Political Theory, Anita is a cellist and mezzo-soprano and studies singing at the Chicago Studio for Professional Singing.
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EDMUND DAIN
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 407
773-834-0087
dain@uchiago.edu
Originally from the U.K., Ed received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cardiff University in 2006, joining the University of Chicago later that year and spending two years working in the philosophy department here before moving across the Quads to the Society of Fellows in 2008. His research interests lie primarily in philosophy of language, metaethics and Wittgenstein and the history of analytic philosophy, and he is working on a number of different projects in these areas. Ed has taught widely in analytic philosophy, including courses in epistemology, philosophy of language, metaethics and the work of Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein, and is currently teaching in the Greek Thought and Literature sequence. He is also a keen cricketer and a talented opening batsman. Or so he says anyway.
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ANDREW DILTS
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 317
773-702-0354
dilts@uchicago.edu
Andrew Dilts is a political theorist who received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2008. His research focuses on the history of political thought, and in particular on the relationship between discourses of citizenship and punishment. He is currently revising his dissertation, "Excess Punishment: State, Citizens, and Felon Disenfranchisement," into a book manuscript while preparing several articles on neo-liberalism and punishment, philosophical treatments of executive pardons, and the role of punishment in early modern political theory.
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ERIN FEHSKENS
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 332
773-702-0512
fehskens@uchicago.edu
Erin received her Ph.D. in English from Duke University in 2008. She teaches in the Readings in World Literature sequence and her research interests include Caribbean, African, and Black Atlantic literature, theories of the epic, poetics, melancholia, and performance. Her dissertation, '“The sea was still going on”: Epic’s Return in the Atlantic World,' is currently under revision for publication. In that project, she argues that epic returns in twentieth century transatlantic literature to address the abiding questions of the genre from its pre-modern iterations—how to stitch together a fundamentally lost community, how to imagine the present as though it were full of the deep past and the possibilities of the future, and how to restructure a community and its aesthetic to reflect this attendance to loss and orientation to lived and literary community. In its Atlantic examples, the epic directs these particular inquiries to the central aim of postcoloniality: how to overreach the limits on difference imposed by the asymmetrical power relations between a colonized figure and the colonizer.
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SAMANTHA FENNO
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 320
sfenno@uchicago.edu
Samantha Fenno teaches in the Human Being and Citizen core sequence. She
received her PhD from the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University.
Her main research interests are English literature and culture of the
long eighteenth century, Wittgenstein, critical theory, and the ways in
which literature and philosophy can be said to influence one another.
Her dissertation, Specters of Skepticism: Henry Fielding and the Problematic
of Recognition, relates skepticism about other minds to the techniques
of representing character to be found in Fielding's fiction and essay
writing, and to the ideas about legal and social reform that he promoted
(and wrote about) as a solicitor and magistrate. She is currently writing
an article about Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, and the aesthetics of
the early English novel.
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BRANDON FOGEL
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 412
773-834-2573
bfogel@uchicago.edu
Brandon Fogel received his Ph.D. in history and philosophy of science in 2008 from the University of Notre Dame. His dissertation examines the epistemological aspects of the debate between Einstein and Weyl over Weyl’s 1918 unified field theory, the first plausible candidate for a theory of everything, for their implications regarding the question of how physical theories in general are connected to experience. The dissertation concludes that a complete account of how a theory gains empirical content requires that certain aspects of observers be representable within the theory itself. Fogel’s current research focuses on Bell’s Theorem and the implications it holds for the separability of physical systems.
DORITH GEVA
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Junior Fellow Co-Chair, 2008-2009
Gates-Blake 303
773-702-3085
geva@uchicago.edu
Dorith received her PhD in sociology from New York University in 2006.
Prior to joining the Society of Fellows, she was a Jean Monnet Fellow
at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She is currently
revising her dissertation into a book manuscript that traces how French
and American policymakers confronted the question of whether men with
families should be conscripted to serve in their national standing armies
around the two World Wars. By uncovering how special considerations for
men with dependents were incorporated into conscription rules, the book
analyzes the politics of men’s obligations to the state, and proposes
to classify states along their particular regimes of citizen obligation.
As an antidote to the more popular analysis of rights, Dorith hopes that
her scholarship on obligations will challenge prevailing interpretations
of masculine autonomy within liberal states, republican notions of universalism,
the public/private divide, and the ideological origins of modern conscription
systems.
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JUDITH GOLDMAN
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 307
773-702-8557
jgoldman1@uchicago.edu
Judith Goldman received her PhD from Columbia University in English and
Comparative Literature (2007). She is currently revising for publication
her doctoral dissertation, “Visible Hand: ‘System,’ Method, and Suasion
in the Human Natural Science of Adam Smith,” an interdisciplinary project
that theorizes the textual form of Smith’s paradigmatic Enlightenment
system-building enterprise as his scientific method. Judith’s general
scholarly interests include the intersection of law (criminal and intellectual
property law, and critical race studies) with literature, material cultures
of textual production and consumption (especially matters of authority
and authorship), and the relationship of affective subjectivity to media;
she also concentrates on gender and sexuality studies and contemporary
American avant-garde poetry. Her new research directions include investigations
of the relation of violence to representation in contemporary experimental
poetry and of the relationship of various modes of late-eighteenth-century
valorization and authentication to literary form in Britain, focusing
especially on the works of Ann Radcliffe. Judith is also the author of
two books of poetry, Vocoder (Roof 2001) and DeathStar/Rico-chet (O 2006),
and the co-editor, with Leslie Scalapino, of War and Peace, an annual
anthology of experimental writing against the war.
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SARAH R. GRAFF
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 409
773-702-3299
s-graff@uchicago.edu
Sarah received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago
in 2006. Her research examines the relationship between political authority
and the economy during the advent and establishment of early states in
the Middle East. She is especially interested in aspects of pre-capitalist
economies that could be considered informal, or not under the control
of the prevailing government. In addition to revising her dissertation
for publication, she is currently co-editing a onograph called Archaeological
Studies of Cooking and Food Preparation, which examines cooking as
a social activity connected to strategies of statecraft, social change,
religion and economics.
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ELIZABETH HEATH
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Science
Gates-Blake 308
773-702-8564
eaheath@uchicago.edu
Elizabeth Heath is a historian of modern Europe whose work focuses on
French colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean. Her current research
examines the emergence and institutionalization of differentiated forms
of citizenship in the colonial and metropolitan regions of France prior
to World War I. Through a comparative study of the metropolitan department
of the Aude and the Caribbean colony of Guadeloupe, her work examines
the process by which rural citizens in the two regions came to enjoy two
very different forms of citizenship. This comparative study suggests new
ways of understanding the possibilities for inclusion of racial and cultural
differences in France during the early years of the Third Republic. She
received her Ph.D. from the Department of History at the University of
Chicago.
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AARON JOHNSON
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 318
773-702-6935
johnsona@uchicago.edu
Aaron Johnson (Ph.D. in Classics, University of Colorado, Boulder) specializes
in Greek literature of the later Roman Empire, particularly in the areas
of ethnic and religious identities and of Hellenism. He has held a junior
fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies (Harvard University)
for work on Eusebius of Caesarea. His publications include a book entitled
Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica (Oxford,
2006), as well as a number of articles in Greek, Roman and Byzantine
Studies, American Journal of Philology, Harvard Theological
Review, and other journals. He is currently working on two book-length
projects dealing with the religious thought of the Platonic philosopher
Porphyry and Hellenicity in late antiquity, respectively. Aside from reading
Greek, Dr. Johnson enjoys skateboarding, playing piano, and hiking.
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REHA KADAKAL
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 329
773-702-1754
rkadakal@uchicago.edu
Reha Kadakal received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the New School For Social Research in 2007. His dissertation “Subjectivity, Consciousness and Determination and the Search for a Conception of Truth in Social Theory” critically examines the conceptions of truth informing classical and contemporary social thought, and it seeks to delineate a concept of truth that would restore subjectivity, freedom and autonomy in modern social theory. In addition to preparing his dissertation for publication, he is also working on a research project on the rise of Islamic political discourse and politics of integration and identity in Western Europe. His general research interests include social and political theory, political sociology of religion and globalization.
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LEIGH CLAIRE LA BERGE
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 403
773-702-7979
lclaberge@uchicago.edu
Leigh Claire La Berge received her Ph.D. from the American Studies program at New York University in 2008. Her dissertation, “Scandals and Abstractions: 1980s Finance and the Revaluation of American Culture” examines the representation of financial forms in contemporary American film, literature, and popular culture. In addition to her work on finance and literature, she has published articles on the critical theory of Slavoj Zizek, American Naturalism, politics within the university setting, and most recently, the aesthetics of globalization. Her next project is focused on affective labor and contemporary psychoanalysis. Her work has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the New York University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
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MOGENS LAERKE
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 330
773-702-1713
mlaerke@uchicago.edu
Mogens Lærke received his Ph.D from the History of Philosophy Department
at the University of Paris IV – Sorbonne in 2003, and has been a post-doctoral
scholar in Denmark and in Israel. His field of interest is early modern
philosophy, early modern intellectual history and the Enlightenment, and
he has worked on themes such as the relations between theology and politics,
the tradition of clandestine philosophy, early modern biblical exegesis,
and methods of religious controversy. He has furthermore written articles
on Spinoza’s metaphysics and Leibniz’s modal philosophy. He is the author
of Leibniz lecteur de Spinoza. La genèse d’une opposition
complexe, forthcoming from Ed. Honoré Champion, and is currently
editing a collective volume on censorship in the Enlightenment, forthcoming
from E. J. Brill.
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HEDY LAW
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Junior Fellow Co-Chair, 2008-2009
Gates-Blake 331
hedylaw@uchicago.edu
Hedy received her Ph.D. in 2007 from the Department of Music at the University
of Chicago. Her main research interests include music, gesture, and non-verbal
communication in the eighteenth century. She is currently revising her
dissertation for publication, tentatively entitled "Gestural Rhetoric:
The Paradox of Pantomime in the French Enlightenment," which examines
the increasingly dominant role of naturalistic gestures in eighteenth-century
French theater and the ways in which they constructed broader concepts
ranging from sign, body, and silence to irony, seduction, danger and freedom.
Looking at pantomimes in works by Rameau, Rousseau, Grétry, Gluck, Piccinni,
and Salieri within the intellectual context of the French Enlightenment,
Gestural Rhetoric argues that the obsession with pantomime cast doubt
on the dominant mimetic theory and paradoxically established expression
as a conceptual derivative of imitation.
Email: hedylaw@uchicago.edu
MARA MARIN
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 333
773-702-7992
mara@uchicago.edu
Mara Marin is a political theorist whose interests range across questions of political authority and legitimacy, political obligation and political community, the generation of norms, as well as the relation between political authority and everyday human practices. Her dissertation develops a conception of commitments and argues that commitments are central not only to personal relationships, but also to work and political relationships. Because making a commitment represents a voluntarily entering a relationship whose details cannot be specified in advance, obligations of commitment are neither given nor deliberately chosen; rather, they are open-ended, and this open-endedness is shared by relationships as different as intimate, work and political relations. Thus, her research offers an alternative to two dominant ways of understanding social and political relationships - as either voluntary, deliberate, contract-like relationships or as given, kin-like relationships. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2008.
DESIRAE MATHERLY
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 312
773-702-2478
djenmatherly@uchicago.edu
Desirae received her Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Ohio University in
2004, one of the few programs in the country offering a doctorate in nonfiction.
Her tradition area includes the personal essay, autobiography, and memoir,
with particular interest in prose that experiments with conventional language
and the aesthetics of the page. Additionally, she studies the balance
of autoanalysis and art in nonfiction, (writing for the self and writing
for others), insisting upon more traditional terms like persona and occasion
that describe the genre's topography more precisely than those of fiction.
Her essays are written for the literary market, are freely digressive
with regard to subject, and at conferences she collaborates on panels
to encourage continuity between contemporary literary nonfiction and the
classical essay of Montaigne.
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LIESL OLSON
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 439
773-702-7993
liesl@uchicago.edu
Liesl received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2004. Her research
interests include twentieth-century British and American literature, modern
and contemporary poetry, Irish studies, and the visual arts. Her book,
Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford University Press, forthcoming
2009), addresses literary modernism's preoccupation with the habitual
and unselfconscious actions of everyday life. Looking primarily at the
work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens and
Marcel Proust, Modernism and the Ordinary argues that a commitment
to representing and valorizing ordinariness undercuts and threatens the
very nature of modernism, as each of these writers is attracted to the
ordinary in a way that tempers the very artfulness of their literary works.
Liesl has also published essays on the work of Henry James, W.H. Auden,
and the contemporary poet Robert Hass.
GEOF OPPENHEIMER
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Visual Arts
Midway 107
773-753-4821
opshop@uchicago.edu
Geof Oppenheimer received his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley
in 2001. His work addresses the formal manifestation of political values.
Through his diverse artistic practice, Oppenheimer investigates political,
social, and artistic binaries ranging from fascism vs. democracy, boutique
vs. homespun and detention vs. agency. Exhibitions include the PS1 Contemporary
Arts Center, Long Island City. NY; The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore;
Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco; MC, Los Angeles; Cohan & Leslie,
New York; Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley; Manchester Metropolitan University,
Manchester; SF Camerawork, San Francisco. Awards include: Fleishhacker
Foundation Eureka Fellowship (2005), Eisner Foundation (2001), Grand Mariner
Foundation (2001). He is represented by The Project, New York.
JENNIFER PALMER
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 435
773-702-7996
jpalmer@uchicago.edu
Jennifer Palmer is a historian and gender scholar of eighteenth-century France whose research focuses on how slavery and colonialism shaped family and patronage. Her research establishes that the movement of people of French and African descent between France and its Caribbean colonies created relationships that defied customary constructions of family and that called for new family strategies. By engaging with historical and feminist scholarship on the family, slavery, and colonialism in the Atlantic world, Palmer complicates notions of family and gender roles and points to the links between French colonialism and changing ideas about European womanhood. She received her doctorate in History and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan in 2008.
SHALINI SATKUNANANDAN
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 433
773-702-8569
shalinis@uchicago.edu
Shalini Satkunanandan received her Ph.D. in 2007 from the Jurisprudence
and Social Policy Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Her
research interests span the history of political thought and philosophy;
contemporary political theory; the relation between politics and ethics;
legal theory and the
limits of modern legal form; and the rhetoric of religion in political
discourse. The overarching concern of Shalini’s research is the relentlessly
“technical” character of modern thinking - where everything appears as
transparent, demonstrable, orderable, and harnessable at will for man’s
purposes - and the way engagements with the sacred offer, or appear to
offer, a reprieve from this technicity. In her dissertation Shalini examines
the phenomenon of “conversion,” the radical reorientation of one’s existence
in response to a call, as this phenomenon appears in the thought of Plato,
Immanuel Kant, and Martin Heidegger. She shows how the phenomenon of a
conversion (or, to speak in non-Christian language, a “turn”) invites
us to rethink contemporary, technical accounts of the relation between
obligation, truth, and freedom. Shalini is currently revising her dissertation
for publication as a book, provisionally titled “The Turn: Plato, Kant,
and Heidegger on the Encounter with the Ground of Obligation.”
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ODED SCHECHTER
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 441
773-834-8705
oschecht@uchicago.edu
Oded Schechter came to the University of Chicago after spending 2006-2007
as an assistant professor at the school of philosophy at Potsdam University
in Germany. He has held a variety of fellowships in Germany, the latest
being a post-doctorate EUME Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
His monograph On the Genealogy of the Hebrew Language is about
to be published. He is currently writing on Spinoza's ontology. Oded received
his BA and MA degrees in philosophy from the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary
Program for Fostering Excellence at Tel Aviv University, and his PhD degree
from the Committee on Social Thought at The University of Chicago.
TARA SCHWEGLER
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 309
773-702-3700
taschweg@uchicago.edu
Tara received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago
in 2004. Her research focuses on developing an ethnographic understanding
of the relationship between state power, forms of economic knowledge,
and the dynamics of political economy in Mexico. Her doctoral thesis,
“;Economics in Action: Negotiating Authority and Building Markets
in Mexico,”; examined the role of neoliberal economics in the genesis
and development of the 1995 New Law of Social Security in Mexico. Drawing
on ethnographic field research with Mexican technocrats, the dissertation
considers how economic ideas work in practice, a move that entails
conceptualizing economic discourse not simply as an abstract paradigm,
but as a fluid set of meanings that are contested and reconfigured as
they are incorporated into specific political matrices. In addition to
preparing the dissertation for publication, she is developing a new project
that involves reconstructing the interactions between NAFTA negotiators
from the U.S. and Mexico in order to gain a deeper understanding of how
personal networks and exchanges have shaped the infrastructure of the
contemporary geopolitical order.
OLGA SEZNEVA
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Weissbourd Conference Coordinator, 2008-2009
Gates-Blake 316
773-702-9918
sezneva@uchicago.edu
Olga Sezneva received her Ph.D. from New York University in 2005, where
she developed her expertise in the sociology of culture and historical
sociology. Olga's interests lie at the intersection of migration, social
memory and post-communist changes. Her forthcoming book, Contingent
Place, Tenacious Homeland, follows the transformation of the German
city of Koenigsberg into the Soviet, and recently Russian, city of Kaliningrad
after the Second World War. Olga Sezneva demonstrates that although Koenigsberg
has vanished, its memory lingers among Russian migrants and their children.
The book traces the forms and practices of the settlers' commitment to
acts of preservation, despite official sanctions against them. Her analysis
uncovers an imperative among the new population to maintain a “collective
memory”; of the German city. The book follows different strategies
of forging a collective past, the goals they accomplish, and the transformation
of these strategies in the context of social change. Olga's work contributes
to our understanding of the relationship between the social construction
of the past and the emergence of new social forms, whether in immigrant
urban communities or the post-communist generation.
Curriculum Vitae
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NITZAN SHOSHAN
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 322
773-834-8678
shoshan@uchicago.edu
Nitzan Shoshan teaches in the Self, Culture and Society core sequence. He received his Ph.D. in 2008 from the department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. His dissertation, “Reclaiming Germany: Young Right Extremists, the Return of the Nation, and the Death of Politics in East Berlin,” is an ethnographic study of right extremist street milieus in a formerly communist district of Germany’s capital. It examines the salient place of racism and ultra-nationalist violence within post-reunification German nationalism and in relation to contemporary global transformations in political idioms. Nitzan’s work has focused on nationalism and the nation-state, violence, the phenomenology of place and space, semiotic theory, ethnic and other forms of difference, and the urban landscape. Currently, Nitzan is revising his dissertation for publication as a book and completing articles on violence and visibility and on the politics of immigration in Europe.
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CHRISTOPHER N. WARREN
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Humanities
Gates-Blake 408
773-702-3083
cnwarren@uchicago.edu
Christopher Warren is a literary scholar who for his doctorate at the
University of Oxford studied the relationship between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
English literature and the emergence of modern international law. Arising
out of this work, the book he is currently preparing for publication, Literature and the Law of Nations in England, 1585-1673, illuminates
literature’s neglected contributions to modern international law by tracing
the Roman-law concept of the law of nations through literary works by
John Milton, William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Thomas Hobbes, and Hugo
Grotius, among others. An article on Milton and Hobbes recently appeared
in English Literary Renaissance, and an article on Hobbes and
the history of international law is forthcoming in The Seventeenth
Century. His related interests include rhetoric, the history of political
thought, Renaissance civic humanism, and the history of the book. He teaches
the “Human Being and Citizen” core sequence.
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RICHARD WESTERMAN
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 432
773-702-6436
rawesterman@uchicago.edu
Richard Westerman received his PhD from Cambridge University in
2006. His thesis on “The Concept of the Conscious Self in Western
Marxism” examined the accounts of personhood and self-recognition
underlying the social theories of thinkers such as Georg Lukács and
Theodor Adorno. For these writers, the experience of living in modern
industrialised society shaped the self-consciousness of the individual.
His current research interests expand the theme of experience in the modern
world, by examining the way memory and identity are related in early twentieth
century European philosophy and literature.
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MAX WHYTE
Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Gates-Blake 440
773-702-8554
maxwhyte@uchicago.edu
Max Whyte received his PhD in history from the University of Cambridge in 2007. His research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth century European intellectual history. His doctoral thesis, ‘Philosophy and Politics in the Third Reich: The Case of Alfred Baeumler’, examines the function of philosophy within the ideational framework of the Third Reich and the significance of National socialism for our understanding of the relationship between philosophy and politics, theory and practice, ‘truth’ and power. A related article on the Nietzsche reception in the Third Reich has appeared in the Journal of Contemporary History. Along with preparing his dissertation for publication, he is also beginning a major new research project on the history of the ‘National Bolshevism’ in inter-war Germany. This diverse movement, which drew on a wide variety of intellectual sources — from Hegel to Nietzsche, and Georges Sorel to Stalin — sought to fuse the politics of the left and right into a single, anti-capitalist, ideological amalgam. The work aims to throw new light both on the complex intellectual forces at work in the Weimar Republic and on the ideological origins of fascism.
Contact information
Julia Klein
Program Coordinator
Society of Fellows
University of Chicago
5845 South Ellis Avenue
Gates-Blake Hall, Rm 327
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 834-0681
(773) 834-0493 - fax
jnklein@uchicago.edu