Brooklyn Public Library
and the
Cultural Services of
the French Embassy
co-present
THURSDAY, JANUARY 28, 2021
6:00 PM - 12:00 MIDNIGHT EST
PRESENTED VIRTUALLY
Brooklyn Public Library
and the
Cultural Services of
the French Embassy
co-present
Zed Adams is chair of the Philosophy Department and co-founder of the Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities at the New School for Social Research. He is currently working on a project on archival aesthetics, on artworks that draw heavily upon archives of pre-existing materials (such as the Lootpack's Soundpieces and Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself).
Elvira Basevich specializes in political philosophy, the history of modern European and Africana philosophy, and feminist philosophy. Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Journal of Political Philosophy, Social Theory & Practice, Philosophical Topics, Australasian Philosophical Review, The Philosophical Forum, and Philosophy & Social Criticism. Her first monograph W.E.B. Du Bois: The Lost and the Found was published with Polity Press in 2020. Her first poetry book, How to Love the World, was also published in 2020 with Pank Press and honors refugee mothers and daughters as the rightful judges of the world. Her next monograph A Hope Not Hopeless: Race, Justice, and Democracy is in progress. She grew up on welfare in an alleyway in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach.
Ben Burgis is is a philosophy instructor, a Jacobin columnist, and the host of the Give Them An Argument podcast and YouTube channel.
Agnes Callard is Associate Professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, where she has been teaching since 2008. She was born in Budapest, Hungary, raised in New York City, and educated at the University of Chicago (BA, 1997) and the University of California, Berkeley (MA, Classics, 1999; PhD, Philosophy, 2008). She is the author of Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (Oxford University Press, 2018), as well as numerous academic articles on Plato and Aristotle. She has written publicly for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Boston Review, and The Wall Street Journal, and she writes a monthly public philosophy column at The Point magazine. She runs a regular evening philosophy discussion (Night Owls), and can be found on twitter at @agnescallard.
Peter Catapano has been an editor at The New York Times Opinion section since 2005, where he began developing projects specifically for the web, and has created and edited more than a dozen popular and influential online series.
In 2010, with the philosopher Simon Critchley, Catapano established The Stone, a weekly philosophy series that is the longest-running in Opinion, and draws millions of readers each year. Since 2012, nearly half of the American Philosophical Association’s public philosophy awards have been given to essays published in The Stone. The series has helped bring philosophical thought back into the national conversation.
Andrea Christelle is the founder of Sedona Philosophy, which uses the amazing natural environment to unlock personal growth and insight. Andrea also founded and for five years directed Philosophy in the Public Interest, and currently serves on the boards of the Public Philosophy Journal and the Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA).
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she is the editor-in-chief and essayist for feministgiant.com
Image © of Robert E. Rutledge.
Yuri Herrera (Actopan, México, 1970). Has written three novels, all of them translated into several languages: Kingdom Cons, Signs Preceding the End of the World, and Transmigration of Bodies; which have been published in English by And Other Stories. In 2016 he shared with translator Lisa Dillman the Best translated Book Award for the translation of Signs Preceding the End of the World. His latest books are A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire and the short story collection Diez planetas. He is currently an associate professor at Tulane University, in New Orleans.
Image © Lisbeth Salas.
Hari Kunzru is the author of six novels, including Gods Without Men, White Tears and Red Pill, which has just been named a 2020 notable book of the year by the New York Times. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and writes the ‘Easy Chair’ column for Harper’s. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at New York University and is the host of the podcast Into the Zone, from Pushkin Industries.
Image © Clayton Cubitt.
Barry Lam is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College. He produces a story-driven podcast about philosophy called Hi-Phi Nation.
Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. He has won the Whiting Writers’ Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta’s work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harper’s Magazine, Time, and Newsweek, and has been featured on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’ and ‘All Things Considered.’
Mehta is an Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University. His book about global migration, This Land is Our Land, was published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in June 2019. He is also working on a nonfiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York, for which he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Mehta has written original screenplays for films, including New York, I Love You. Mehta was born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay and New York. He is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Valeria Motta received her doctorate from the University of Birmingham, where she was a member of the Epistemic Innocence research group. Her research is on loneliness and solitude.
Ian Olasov is the author of Ask a Philosopher: Answers to Your Most Important -- and Most Unexpected -- Questions (St. Martin's Press, 2020). In partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library, he has organized the Brooklyn Public Philosophers event series since 2013, which has held Ask a Philosopher booths, philosophy talks, screenings, and more in Brooklyn and beyond. He is an adjunct lecturer in the Philosophy Department at Brooklyn College, and lives in Flatbush with his two dogs and one partner.
Cailin O’Connor is a philosopher of science and applied mathematician specializing in models of social interaction. She is an Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science at the University of California, Irvine. She is currently co-administering the NSF Grant Consensus, Democracy, and the Public Understanding of Science. Her book The Misinformation Age, co-authored with James Owen Weatherall, was published in 2019 with Yale Press, and her book The Origins of Unfairness was also published in 2019 with Oxford University Press. Her work has been praised widely, including in the New York Times and Scientific American.
Nell Painter (the visual artist formerly known as the historian Nell Irvin Painter, Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, Princeton University, author of The History of White People, Old in Art School, Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol and Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over) lives and works in Newark, New Jersey. She writes opinion pieces for the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Paris Review and other journals when not painting self-portraits and artist’s books that visualize people and history.
Image © Dwight Carter.
Renata Salecl is a philosopher, sociologist, and legal theorist. She is a senior researcher at the Institute of Criminology at Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London. Her book Tyranny of Choice has been published in 15 languages. Her last book is A Passion for Ignorance: What We Choose Not to Know and Why (Princeton University Press, 2020).
Photo by Miran Juršič.
Kieran Setiya teaches philosophy at MIT, working mainly in ethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. He is the author of Midlife: A Philosophical Guide. His work has appeared in Aeon, The Guardian, The New York Times, and elsewhere.
Patti Smith is the author of Just Kids, which won the National Book Award in 2010, and of M Train, as well as numerous collections of poetry and essays. Her seminal album Horses has been hailed as one of the top 100 albums of all time. In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Smith the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres; she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.
Photo courtesy of Patti Smith.
Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, writer, and political organizer. She is the director of the philosophical documentaries What Is Democracy?, Examined Life, and Zizek!; the author of the American Book Award winner The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age; and a co-founder of the Debt Collective. She has written for The New York Times, The London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Baffler, n+1, and many other outlets. Her latest book is Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone.
Dr. Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She is the author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (2011) and Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (2018); she also co-wrote, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (2013). She has written for ArtForum, The Guardian, Playgirl, Spike Art Quarterly The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times. She teaches at the New School for Social Research and supervises doctoral students in clinical psychology at the City University of New York. She is a member of IPTAR and Das Unbehagen.
Ai Weiwei is renowned for making strong aesthetic statements that resonate with timely phenomena across today’s geopolitical world. From architecture to installations, social media to documentaries, Ai uses a wide range of mediums as expressions of new ways for his audiences to examine society and its values. Recent exhibitions include: Ai Weiwei: Resetting Memories at MARCO in Monterrey, Ai Weiwei: Bare Life at the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum in St. Louis, Ai Weiwei at the K20/K21 in Dusseldorf, and Good Fences Make Good Neighbors with the Public Art Fund in New York City.
Ai was born in Beijing in 1957 and currently resides and works in Berlin. Ai is the recipient of the 2015 Ambassador of Conscience Award from Amnesty International and the 2012 Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent from the Human Rights Foundation.
Photo: Ai Weiwei Studio
Vanessa Wills is a political philosopher, ethicist, educator, and activist working in Washington, DC.
She is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University. In 2019/20, she was additionally the DAAD Visiting Chair in Ethics and Practice at Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität’s Munich Center for Ethics.
Her areas of specialization are moral, social, and political philosophy, nineteenth-century German philosophy (especially Karl Marx), and the philosophy of race. Her research is importantly informed by her study of Marx’s work and focuses on the ways in which economic and social arrangements can inhibit or promote the realization of values such as freedom, equality, and human development.
Dr. Wills is on the editorial board of Spectre Journal, a biannual journal of Marxist theory, strategy, and analysis.
She received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 2011, where she wrote her dissertation on the topic, “Marx and Morality.” She conducted part of her dissertation research at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin as a Fulbright Scholar in the 2010-11 academic year. Dr. Wills received her Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Princeton University in 2002.