The first guest of the History of Consciousness Spring 2026 Research Colloquium will be joining us next Monday, April 27th! This event brings Linda Zerilli to give her talk “The Feminist Democratic Imaginary: Actualizing Pasts, Creating Futures”.

Feminist historians have long challenged the progress narrative — the story in which each wave supersedes the last, the arc bends toward justice, and history moves only one way. Yet despite decades of critique, no compelling alternative relationship to the past has emerged. We are caught in a double bind: premodern exemplarity is unavailable to us, and the modern alternative forecloses the future by making it seem already scripted. This paper develops a third relationship — the feminist democratic imaginary — that returns us to action through history rather than offering an escape from action into it. Drawing on Arendt, Koselleck, Castoriadis, Benjamin, and Hartman, it argues that the past is not a repository of recoverable resources but the site of an encounter — and the encounter is not a transfer across time but a creation. This reorientation has direct political consequences: if the past is an occasion for creation rather than a ground of conditions, then authoritarian backlash is not a contraction of the possible but a new occasion — a moment of danger that makes defeated alternatives newly legible and calls for figures of the thinkable that neither the past nor the present alone could have generated.

Join us in-person on April 27th at 1pm in Hum 1 Rm 210, or register to attend virtually at this link.

Linda M. G. Zerilli is the Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College. Zerilli is the author of Signifying Woman (Cornell University Press, 1994), Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 2005), A Democratic Theory of Judgment (University of Chicago Press, 2016), A Democratic Theory of Truth (University of Chicago Press, 2025), and articles on subjects ranging across feminist thought, the politics of language, aesthetics, democratic theory, and Continental philosophy. She has been a Fulbright Fellow, a two-time Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and a Stanford Humanities Center Fellow, and a Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences Fellow. She has served on the executive committee of Political Theory and the advisory boards of The American Political Science Review, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Constellations, and Culture, Theory and Critique.