Please join us on Friday, February 8, 2013 for our next Mellon meeting! We will be meeting at 12pm in the English Department (70 Brown Street), Room 315. We will be hosting Professor Jodi Dodi, professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. She teaches broadly within modern and contemporary
political theory, ranging from feminism to fascism, consumption, and
citizenship. Her research interests include digital media;
poststructuralism and psychoanalysis; neoliberalism and consumerism;
cultural studies; and feminism theory. Dean's impressive list of
publications boasts numerous journal articles, contributions to collected volumes, and seven monographs including Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Duke UP, 2009),
Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Cornell UP, 2002),
and her forthcoming work, The Communist Horizon (Verso, October 2012).
Dean has edited and co-edited several collected volumes addressing
questions of feminism, empire, and information networks. Dean also
serves as co-editor of Theory and Event, an electronic academic journal published quarterly by John Hopkins University Press.
Professor Dean will come and talk with the workshop about some of her previous work, as well as a forthcoming project that she will be workshopping with the group. All readings will be available on the google site (log-in required). Lunch will be provided.
We are also delighted to sponsor a public talk that evening. Professor Dean will give a lecture entitled "Communicative capitalism: this is what democracy looks like" on Friday, February 8, 2013 at 4pm in Pembroke Hall, Room 305. This lecture is also co-sponsored through the generous support of the Department of Political Science, the Department of Sociology, and the Graduate Student Council at Brown University.
Welcome back! We are looking forward to starting our Spring Semester with a brief meeting on Monday, January 28th at 7pm. Our meeting will be held off-campus, location to be sent over email. Readings will include several essays from an edited collection responding to Jurgen Habermas, Habermas's 1964 "Public Sphere" encyclopedia entry, and some optional readings from Hannah Arendt. Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is on reserve at the Rockefeller Library. Readings are all available via the google site (log-in required).
We have a tentative Spring schedule posted on the syllabus.
Our final meeting of the fall semester will be held Monday, December 10, 2012 at 7:00, location forthcoming over email. We will be reading Michael Warner's Publics and Counterpublics (2002)--if you still haven't picked up your copy, email Devon. If you are pressed for time, please try and read the first chapter and the essay co-written with Lauren Berlant, "Sex in Public." We also look forward to workshopping a paper from Michael Benitez, who has agreed to present a piece in progress on Oscar Wilde and the public sphere entitled "Wilde
Perfection: (New) Aestheticism, Weaponized Discourse, and the Aesthetics of
Sexuality in The Picture of Dorian Gray." More details to follow over email.
At Monday's meeting, we will also go over plans for our Spring semester schedule--please think about possible dates that you would be willing to workshop a chapter or recent piece you have been working on. We will update the site with the spring semester syllabus in the next few weeks.
Please note that the location has changed to Room 315 from the originally scheduled October meeting.
Please join us for our next Mellon Workshop meeting on Monday, November 26 at 12pm, at 70 Brown Street (The English Department), Room 315. We will be hosting Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, professor of English at Northeastern University, whose research
interests include Early American literature and drama; feminist,
political and aesthetic theory; transatlantic print culture; Atlantic
colonialism; and the early novel. In her first book, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford
UP, 2004), Dillon argues that narratives of citizenship and
subjectivity within liberalism include - and, indeed, rely upon -
depictions of women that encourage affective identification as an
unspoken political act and thereby complicate the distinction between
private and public spheres. Currently, Dillon is working on her
manuscript for New World Drama: Theatre of the Atlantic, 1660-1850, as well as co-editing a volume of essays on early American culture and the Haitian Revolution.
For Monday's meeting, we will be reading selections from Dillon's The Gender of Freedom, a recent essay entitled "John Marrant Blows the French Horn," as well as a forthcoming essay from Professor Dillon. All readings are available here (log-in required). There are also additional, optional readings available for this week's discussion.
Our next Mellon meeting will be held Monday, November 5, 2012 at 12pm in
Partridge Hall (Third World Center), Room 104. We will be reading selections from David Eng's The Feeling of Kinship (2010), Corey Brettschneider's "The Politics of the Personal: A Liberal Approach" (2007), Sharon Krause's "Lady Liberty's Allure: Political Agency, Citizenship and The Second Sex" (2000), and a chapter from Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia (2001). All readings are available for download here.
Our readings this week deal with questions about race, gender, sexuality, and the public/private sphere. We will think through how various identities are represented publicly while nevertheless facing political privitization.
Join us for lunch and discussion! We will also discuss the recent schedule changes and plan for the rest of the semester.
RESCHEDULED! Due to Hurricane Sandy, we will be rescheduling Professor Dillon's visit for later in the semester. Please check the syllabus for the schedule changes.
Please join us for our next Mellon Workshop meeting on Monday, October 29 at 12pm, at 70 Brown Street (The English Department), Room 218. We will be hosting Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, professor of English at Northeastern University, whose research
interests include Early American literature and drama; feminist,
political and aesthetic theory; transatlantic print culture; Atlantic
colonialism; and the early novel. In her first book, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford
UP, 2004), Dillon argues that narratives of citizenship and
subjectivity within liberalism include - and, indeed, rely upon -
depictions of women that encourage affective identification as an
unspoken political act and thereby complicate the distinction between
private and public spheres. Currently, Dillon is working on her
manuscript for New World Drama: Theatre of the Atlantic, 1660-1850, as well as co-editing a volume of essays on early American culture and the Haitian Revolution.
For Monday's meeting, we will be reading selections from Dillon's The Gender of Freedom, a recent essay entitled "John Marrant Blows the French Horn," as well as a forthcoming essay from Professor Dillon. All readings are available here (log-in required). There are also additional, optional readings available for this week's discussion.
Our third Mellon meeting will be held Monday, October 15, 2012 at 12pm in Partridge Hall (Third World Center), Room 104. Join us for lunch and conversation as we discuss John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems (1927) and Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty" (1958). Copies of the Dewey were distributed at our previous meeting--if you need a copy, please email Devon to arrange a pickup. "Two Concepts of Liberty" is available on the accompanying documents site (available here, log in required). You may also want to bring copies of Lippmann, as the Dewey piece responds directly to The Phantom Public.
Professor Philip Gould, the Nicholas Brown Professor of Oratory and Belles Lettres (Department of English), will be joining our discussion of Dewey and Berlin. Professor Gould has recently taught a graduate seminar on American liberalism and is the faculty advisor for our Mellon workshop.
Our previous meeting, in which we discussed Rawls and Lippmann raised a number of stimulating questions about the potency of liberalism as a political philosophy, as well as its more aesthetic use of the imagination.
Please join us on Friday, February 8, 2013 for our next Mellon meeting! We will be meeting at 12pm in the English Department (70 Brown Street), Room 315. We will be hosting Professor Jodi Dodi, professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. She teaches broadly within modern and contemporary
political theory, ranging from feminism to fascism, consumption, and
citizenship. Her research interests include digital media;
poststructuralism and psychoanalysis; neoliberalism and consumerism;
cultural studies; and feminism theory. Dean's impressive list of
publications boasts numerous journal articles, contributions to collected volumes, and seven monographs including Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Duke UP, 2009),
Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Cornell UP, 2002),
and her forthcoming work, The Communist Horizon (Verso, October 2012).
Dean has edited and co-edited several collected volumes addressing
questions of feminism, empire, and information networks. Dean also
serves as co-editor of Theory and Event, an electronic academic journal published quarterly by John Hopkins University Press. 
