Rescheduled for March 15, 2017

Akash Kumar focuses on the crossing of poetry, philosophy, and science in 13th-14th century Italy, emphasizing multicultural knowledge transmission in the medieval Mediterranean. His talk emerges from his second book project on medieval Italian representations of chess and the exchange made possible by the game across gender, religious, and social boundaries. Akash Kumar is a […]

Conquest, Contact, and Cosmovision: SF Rewritings of the Conquest of the Americas Zac Zimmer’s current project reads original narratives of the conquest of the Americas and the philosophical debates it engendered with and against recent aesthetic attempts to reimagine that historical moment in marginal genres, especially alternative history and first contact science fiction, creating a […]

This talk is drawn from Professor Porter’s current book project examining the history of San Francisco International Airport (SFO) and various social and political phenomena associated with it as a means of better understanding the core San Francisco Bay Area as a physical, social, and imagined urban space. The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a […]

"Contemporary Chinese Capitalism and Its Critical Landscape" This talk draws on a work in progress entitled Revolutionary China and its Late Capitalist Fate, an analysis of the nature of post-reform China's political economy, with particular attention to how this has affected everyday life, intellectual and critical work, ideological formation, cultural production, social movements, political action, and […]

"Roots in Air: People/Plants/Ethics in Suspension" Out of the urban ruins and food deprivation of World War II came the prototype for growing plants aeroponically. Aeroponics has since taken surprising turns as a technology for anthropocenic conditions – in Global South laboratories; “vertical gardens”; art installations; plant biology experiments for colonizing the cosmos. In its […]

Socratic Economics Martin Devecka is in the early stages of a research project on leisure and labor in fourth-century Athens.  His work explores the processes through which competing claims to leisure and to the labor of others led to the privileging of politics as a way of thinking about collective action. Martin Devecka is an […]

Johan Mathew’s current project, Opiates of the Masses: Labor, Narcotics, and Global Capitalism, explores the history of narcotics in order to interrogate the concepts of “consumer demand” and “rational choice” in market exchange, focusing on the consumption of narcotics by workers in Asia and Africa to alleviate the stresses of labor under capitalism. Johan Matthew […]