Leverhulme Research Professor and Professor and Chair of English
University of York

Reading and Responsibility

“At its most valuable, literature challenges us to reconfigure the frameworks by which we understand the world…” — Derek Attridge in an interview with Mark Thwaite for ReadySteadyBook.com, 2004

Derek Attridge is Leverhulme Research Professor and Chair of English at the University of York. A scholar of remarkable range and sensitivity, Attridge is known as a leading interpreter of James Joyce, J.M.Coetzee, and Jacques Derrida as well as a brilliant theorist of poetic form and literary language. He is the author of nine books, including How to Read Joyce (2007), Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (1995), and The Singularity of Literature (2004), winner of the 2006 European Society for the Study of English Book Award.

Through his work, Attridge attends to reading and writing as creative acts and ethical engagements that make a difference in the world, and to the specific force of the literary to effect strange and potent communication across time and space. Attridge addresses in his work the question of what we might learn—of receptivity, of otherness, of responsibility—by way of reading.

History
University of Washington

Translation in Wartime

Room 120
UW Kane Hall

“Translation looks two ways. It opens up a passage, drawing near what at the same time will always remain afar. ” — Vicente L. Rafael, “Translation in Wartime”

Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington. Renowned for the reach, breadth, and robust cosmopolitanism of his scholarship, Rafael works across three languages and three centuries of modern empire. The author of numerous books, including The Promise of the Foreign (2005), White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (2000), and Contracting Colonialism (1993), Rafael focuses on modernity, nationalism, colonialism, and post-colonialism in global history and for the global present.

Rafael’s lecture will inquire into the historical, political, and pragmatic relationship between translation and empire. Drawing attention to the complex ethics of translation practices, he examines how iterations of translation consolidate and confound imperial projects. Through a consideration of the language initiatives and policies attending the so-called War on Terror, Rafael probes the ways in which the demand for translation induces and intensifies the war of meanings, the confusion of address, and the crisis of identities in U.S.–occupied Iraq.

Political Science
University of California, Berkeley

Porous Sovereignty, Walled Democracy

Room 120
UW Kane Hall
7 PM

Wendy Brown is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of numerous influential books, including Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Empire and Identity (2006), Politics Out of History (2001), and States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995). Known for her subtle and sophisticated interpretations of political theory and practice, her work elucidates the contemporary knots tying subordination and freedom, exclusion and equality, markets and democracy, state institutions and social movements.

In her Katz lecture, Brown will address the curious phenomenon that finds nation-states building physical walls at their borders. In an ostensibly connected global world, such walls raise a series of questions. What is the relationship between these walls and the erosion of national sovereignty by transnational forces? Do the walls assert sovereignty or confess its failures? What is the relationship of economy and security at the site of walls? And what transformation in democracy do the new walls herald?

Hear this lecture in downloadable MP3.