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Speakers: 2009-2010
André Aciman
- Presidential Lecturer 2009-10
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York [+]André Aciman is the author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir and the collection of essays False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory. He has also co–authored and edited The Proust Project and Letters of Transit, and most recently has written a novel, Call Me By your Name.
Born in Alexandria, he lived in Italy and France. He received his PhD from Harvard University and has taught at Princeton University and Bard College and is currently Distinguished Professor and chair of the Graduate Center's doctoral program in comparative literature as well the founder and director of The Writers' Institute. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship from The New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The New Republic. His novel, Eight White Nights, will appear this winter.
To read more about André Aciman, visit the Stanford Presidential Lectures website: http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/aciman/
Frederick Cooper
- Marta Sutton Weeks Distinguished Visitor 2009-10
Department of History, New York University [+]Frederick Cooper is Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of a trilogy of books on labor and society in East Africa and more recently of Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa(1996), Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (2002), and Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (2005).
He is also co-author with Thomas Holt and Rebecca Scott of Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Post-Emancipation Societies (2000), and co-editor with Ann Stoler of Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (1997), with Randall Packard of International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays in the History and Politics of Knowledge (1997), and with Craig Calhoun and Kevin Moore of Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power (2006).
His book co-authored with Jane Burbank, Empires in World History is currently in press, and he is working on the history of citizenship in France and French West Africa between 1945 and 1960.
Mary Robinson
- Presidential Lecturer 2009-10
President, Realizing Rights, Former President Of Ireland (1990-1997), Former United Nations High Commissioner For Human Rights (1997-2002)
Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative [+]Mary Robinson is the President of Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative. She served as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002 and as President of Ireland from 1990-1997. She is a member of the Elders. She is co-founder and former Chair of the Council of Women World Leaders and Vice President of the Club of Madrid. She is Honorary President of Oxfam International and is Patron of the International Community of Women Living with AIDS (ICW). She is chair of the GAVI Alliance. She is President of the International Commission of Jurists. She is a professor of practice at Columbia University and member of the Advisory Board of the Earth Institute and Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. She serves as Chancellor of Dublin University.
Tzvetan Todorov
- Tzvetan Todorov is a philosopher, theorist, and literary critic. Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, he has lived in France since 1963. Since 1968, he has been a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, where he has been Directeur de recherche honoraire since 2005. He is author of numerous books, many of which have been translated into English, including The Poetics of Prose (1977), Introduction to Poetics (1981), The Conquest of America (1984), Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (1984), Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (1996), On Human Diversity (1993), Hope and Memory (2003), and Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism (2002), and The New World Disorder: Reflections of a European (2005). He is member of many scholarly organizations and recipient of numerous prizes, including the Prix Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1991), the Spinoza (2004), and the Prince of Asturias (2008).