Series Events
Series Events
Global Socialist Networks in the Age of Three Worlds: Art and Arbitrage from Mexico to Moscow
- Speaker: Kevin M. F. Platt, Professor of Comparative Literature, Russian and East European Studies
- Event Type: Distinguished Speaker Series
- Speaker University: University of Pennsylvania
- Event Date: March 4, 2026
- Event Start Time: 5:15 PM
- Event End Time: 6:45 PM
- Event Location: AB 4052
What do the nonconformist Soviet author Vladimir Voinovich, the blacklisted American author Howard Fast, and the Mexican leftist printmaking collective the Taller de Gráfica Popular have in common? They all engaged in cultural exchange that bridged between the “three worlds” of the middle to late twentieth century. In those years, cultural exchange between the developed capitalist world, the socialist world, and the regions of the developing world or global south was shaped and driven by opposed, yet interpenetrating, modes of aesthetic, political and economic evaluation. What was esteemed by art markets, publishers and museums in New York, promoting the banner of artistic autonomy, was excoriated in Moscow cultural institutions oriented on Socialist Realism. Yet, often enough, leftist cultural figures of the developing world had greater appreciation for the avant-garde past of Soviet and European Socialist art than for the formally conservative aesthetics of “mature socialism.” This created the conditions for arbitrage: the movement of works of negligible or negative economic or political value in one setting to a location where their distinctive resonance brought in top dollar, ruble, political agency, or reputational gain, as the case may be. For agents and institutions balanced on the borders, such exchange offered special opportunities to make art and to generate political and economic value. In this lecture, examination of three case studies of cultural arbitrage makes possible a revision of influential theories of world cultural circulation and interaction (Moretti, Pascale, etc.) and new angles of vision on the cultural life of the singular globe in the era of three worlds.
Faculty Lecture Series: Trans Tessituras & the Queer Arrangements of Listening in Difference
- Speaker: Professor Daniel da Silva
- Event Type: Faculty Lecture Series
- Event Date: February 25, 2026
- Event Start Time: 12:15 PM
- Event End Time: 1:45 PM
- Event Location: AB 4052
Faculty Lecture Series: Jerusalem within Athens: The Theological Substratum of Derrida's 'Plato's Pharmacy'
- Speaker: Azzan Yadin-Israel, Professor of Jewish Studies and Classics
- Event Type: Faculty Lecture Series
- Speaker University: Rutgers University
- Event Date: October 22, 2025
- Event Start Time: 11:30 AM
- Event End Time: 1:30 PM
- Event Location: Academic Building 4052
Jerusalem within Athens: The Theological Substratum of Derrida's 'Plato's Pharmacy'
"Plato's Pharmacy," Jacque Derrida's study of Plato's Phaedrus, has exerted massive influence on critical theory as well as the study of Plato. In this presentation, I put forth two interrelated arguments. First, that the essay is indefensible as a reading of Plato. Second, that exegetical coherence is of secondary import, since "Plato's Pharmacy," despite its surface form, is concerned less with Plato than with Christianity and Judaism as modes of textual understanding. (Photo credit: Joel Robine/AFP/Getty Images)
Comparative Worldings: The Case of Indian Literatures
- Speaker: PROF. PREETHA MANI
- Event Type: Faculty Lecture Series
- Event Date: April 8, 2019
- Event Location: Academic Building 4050
You are cordially invited to join us for a presentation by:
PROF. PREETHA MANI
“Comparative Worldings: The Case of Indian Literatures”
Through the juxtaposition of the Indian-English, Hindi, and Tamil literary spheres, this talk argues for a focus on how writers and texts perform acts of “worlding,” rather than defining which texts belong in the global literary canon, as contemporary scholarship has done. Such acts mobilize “world literature” to define certain texts as “literary,” while simultaneously concealing other existing literary processes and social relations.
Exploring how prominent writing circles in London, North India, and Madras “worlded” Indian literature reveals not only that the national language question engendered multiple politics of literary translation, but also that a theory of translation underpins any conception of world literature.
What a comparative worlding approach offers, then, is attention to the political stakes in framing relations between region, nation, and world. More specifically, it shows how processes of worlding — whether at the scale of the regional, the national, or the global — elevate some texts and exclude others from the category of the “literary.”
The unique approaches to translation and Indian literature that these writers formulated in response to the national language debate illustrate multiple and varied acts of worlding, offering alternative avenues through which to understand the categories of Indian and world literature.
Dante, Franciscan Poverty, and the Donation of Constantine
- Speaker: Prof. Alessandro Vettori
- Event Type: Faculty Lecture Series
- Speaker University: Rutgers University
- Event Date: April 19, 2019
