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Speakers: 2007-2008
Partha Chatterjee
- Director, Centre For Studies In Social Sciences, Calcutta, Professor Of Anthropology, Anthropologist
Columbia University [+]Excerpt from the webpage curated by William Wheeler on the Presidential Lectures site hosted by Stanford University Libraries: Partha Chatterjee was born in Calcutta in 1947. He completed a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Rochester in 1972. He is currently Director and Professor of Political Science at The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta, and Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. In addition to a rich bibliography, his curriculum vitae documents, over a number of pages, a career of academic positions in India and the United States; a wealth of visiting professorships across Europe, Asia and North America; and a dizzying list of invited lectures that span the globe.
Stefan Collini, FBA
- Professor Of Intellectual History And English, Cambridge University [+]PROFESSOR STEFAN COLLINI, FBA, is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University. He has written widely on the relations between literature and intellectual history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and is author of Liberalism and Sociology (1979), That Noble Science of Politics (1983), Public Moralists (1991), Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait (1994), English Pasts (1999), and Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (2006). Collini has edited works by J.S. Mill, Matthew Arnold, Umberto Eco, and C.P. Snow, and published essays on T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, George Orwell, Raymond Williams, cultural criticism, and the historical development of the concept of 'culture,' among other topics. His current research interests include 'Condition-of-England' writing, social criticism, literary journalism, the history of literary criticism, and ideas of culture. Collini is a frequent contributor to journals such as The Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books.
Marjorie Garber
- English and Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University [+]MARJORIE GARBER is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, and Chair of the Program in Dramatic Arts. She has served as Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, Chair of the department of Visual and Environmental Studies, and Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. A member of the Board of Directors of the American Council of Learned Societies and a Trustee of the English Institute, she is the former President of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, and a continuing member of its board. She has published fifteen books and edited seven collections of essays on topics from Shakespeare to literary and cultural theory to the arts and intellectual life. Shakespeare After All (Pantheon, 2004) received the 2005 Christian Gauss Book Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
Newsweek magazine chose Shakespeare After All as one of the five best nonfiction books of 2004, and praised it as the "indispensable introduction to an indispensable writer ... Garber's is the most exhilarating seminar room you'll ever enter."
Her most recent book from Pantheon is Shakespeare and Modern Culture (Pantheon, 2008). She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
N. Katherine Hayles
- University of California, Los Angeles [+]
David Lieberman
- Jefferson E. Peyser Professor Of Law, University Of California, Berkeley [+]David Lieberman joined the Boalt Hall School of Law at University of California, Berkeley in 1984. Before coming to Berkeley, he taught at Cambridge University and was a fellow and director of studies in history at Christ's College, Cambridge. He served as associate dean of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program and chaired the undergraduate Legal Studies Program from 2000-04. In 2003, he helped found the Consortium of Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs, an international organization of law and society departments and undergraduate majors. He currently is president of the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies.Lieberman is a recipient of research fellowships and awards from St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, the Institute of Historical Research, the American Bar Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science. He was an honorary research fellow of the Department of History at University College, London; a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School; and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. His book, The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth Century Britain, received honorable mention for the 1990 British Council Prize.
Elaine Scarry
- Walter M. Cabot Professor Of Aesthetics And The General Theory Of Value, Harvard University [+]Elaine Scarry is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. She is the author of numerous works renowned for their scholarly daring, including On Beauty and Being Just (1999); Dreaming by the Book (1999); Resisting Representation (1994), and The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World (1985). Her interests include theory of representation, the language of physical pain, and the structure of verbal material making in art, science, and the law.
Simon Schaffer
- Professor Of History Of Science, University Of Cambridge [+]Simon Schaffer is Professor of History of Science at the University of Cambridge. He was trained in natural sciences and history of science at Cambridge and Harvard and has taught at Imperial College London.
He is the co-author, with Steven Shapin, of Leviathan and the Air Pump (Princeton 1985) and joint winner of the 2005 Erasmus Prize. His more recent publications include edited collections The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago 1999) and The Mindful Hand (Chicago 2007) on industry and inquiry in early modern Europe.
Simon Schama
- University Professor Of Art History And History, Columbia University [+]SIMON SCHAMA is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University, and the author of thirteen books (including Citizens, Landscape and Memory, Rembrandt's Eyes, Rough Crossings and, most recently, The Power of Art) which have been translated into fifteen languages. As broadcaster he has written and presented over thirty films for the BBC including the Emmy-nominated "A History of Britain" and the eight-part "Power of Art" which aired on PBS in June 2007. Schama writes regularly on culture and politics for The Guardian newspaper in London and The New Yorker and won a National Magazine Award for his art criticism in 1996. He was Mellon Lecturer at the National Gallery in the fall of 2006.
Richard Taruskin
- Class Of 1955 Professor Of Music, University Of California, Berkeley [+]Richard Taruskin has contributed to five fields of musical research--Russian and Soviet music, twentieth-century music, the theory of performance, music and politics, and general historiography--and transformed all five. His work has been reviewed in eight languages and translated into nine. As a part-time musical journalist, appearing regularly in The New York Times and The New Republic, he has taken part in numerous highly fraught public debates--on the social role of art and the social responsibilities of artists, on censorship, and on the possibility of cognitive constraints on musical perception--and has earned a reputation, to quote the German magazine Der Spiegel, as "America's national musicologist."
David Thomson
- Film Critic, The New York Times, Film Comment, Salon.Com [+]David Thomson is the author of the lauded New Biographical Dictionary of Film. He was a teacher of film studies at Dartmouth College and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, Film Comment, Movieline, the New Republic, and salon.com. As well, he has served on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival and wrote the script for the award-winning documentary The Making of a Legend: Gone With the Wind.
Anthony Tommasini
- Chief Classical Music Critic, The New York Times [+]Anthony Tommasini is the chief classical music critic of the New York Times, a pianist, and the author of a biography, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), which won a 1998 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Yale University and a doctorate in music from Boston University. In 2004 Times Books/Henry Holt released his latest book, The New York Times Essential Library: Opera, A Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important Works and the Best Recordings. He lives in New York City.
Marina Warner
- Writer, Cultural Historian, And Novelist; Literature, Film, And Theatre Studies, University Of Essex, Uk [+]Marina Warner is a writer of fiction, criticism, and history, who explores mythology, symbolism, and fairy tales with an emphasis on their contemporary meanings. Her books include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), Monuments & Maidens (1985), From the Beast to the Blonde (1994) and Monsters of Our Own Making (1998). In 1994 she gave the Reith Lectures on the BBC, on the theme of Six Myths of Our Time. She has also published novels and short stories, including The Lost Father (1988), Indigo (1992), and The Leto Bundle (2001). Her most recent book, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media, a study of ghosts, phantasms and technology, appeared in 2006. She also curates exhibitions, exploring themes such as visions, illusions, and make-believe, contributes regularly to many journals and broadcasts, including the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, and has lectured in many different countries. She is professor of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. She is currently writing Stranger Magic, about the influence of the Arabian Nights, as well as a new novel inspired by her childhood in Cairo. In 2005 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and has been given many Honorary Doctorates, including one by the University of Oxford.