Speakers: “Histories of Race” - The Shasha Seminar for Human Concerns, April 8–10, 2011

Keynote speaker

[Nell Irvin Painter] Nell Irvin Painter is the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University, and the author of seven books, including Soujourner Truth, Standing at Armageddon, and The History of White People. She has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to her scholarly life, Nell Painter received a BFA degree in painting from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers–the State University of New Jersey in 2009. She is currently an MFA student in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and will graduate in June of this year.

Facilitator

[Andrew Curran] Andrew Curran is professor of French in Wesleyan’s Romance languages and literatures department. A specialist of the French 18th century, Curran’s research has focused on a variety of topics related to the philosopher Denis Diderot, scientific academy debates, and the science of French empire. He is the editor of Faces of Monstrosity in Eighteenth-Century Thought and author of Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe. His more recent book, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment, is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press in 2011. Curran was elected a fellow in the history of medicine at the New York Academy of Medicine in 2010.

Presenters

[Robert Bernasconi] Robert Bernasconi is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He works in critical philosophy of race as well as in 19th- and 20th-century continental philosophy. In addition to two books on Heidegger and a book on Sartre, he has edited numerous books on race including (with Tommy Lott) The Idea of Race, Race, and (with Sybol Cook) Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy. He is currently writing a series of essays on the history of the concept of race as well as a longer examination of the philosophical response to slavery.

[Denise K. Buell] Denise K. Buell is professor of religion at Williams College and a regular contributor to the women’s and gender studies program. Her research explores the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and religion in the study of early Christian history, asking how contemporary and ancient concerns have affected the interpretation and reconstruction of early Christian history and texts; her work appears in multiple articles as well in as two books, Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy and Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity. Her current research examines how religious texts and communities have created or transgressed boundaries existing among different "kinds" of humans, as well as between humans and non-humans (other animals, divinities).

[Frank Dikötter] Frank Dikötter was professor of the modern history of China at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, for many years before moving to Asia as chair professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong. He has pioneered the use of archival sources and published nine books that have changed the way historians view modern China, from the classic The Discourse of Race in Modern China to his last book entitled Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe.

[Bobby Donaldson] Bobby Donaldson (Wesleyan ’93, trustee) is associate professor of history and the faculty principal of Preston Residential College at the University of South Carolina. In addition to publishing scholarly articles and essays on African American intellectual thought, print culture, education and religion, he has served as a consultant for numerous museum exhibitions, historic preservation projects, oral histories, and documentary films, such as the PBS series Slavery and the Making of America. His book In Our Defense: Black Intellectuals in the Jim Crow South is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press. Donaldson is currently working on a biography of William Jefferson White, a radical Reconstruction minister and editor who founded Morehouse College in 1867.

[Diego von Vacano] Diego von Vacano (Wesleyan ’93) is assistant professor of political science at Texas A&M University. He was born in Bolivia and emigrated as a political refugee to the United States. After attending Wesleyan, he received a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University and a PhD in politics from Princeton University. His research concentrates on political theory, history of political thought, and political philosophy. He is the author of The Art of Power: Machiavelli, Nietzsche and the Making of Aesthetic Political Theory and The Color of Citizenship: Race, Modernity and Latin American Political Thought, which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. He has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. His current principal focus is the normative approach to the politics of race, ethnicity, and immigration.

[Richard Weikart] Richard Weikart is professor of modern European history at California State University, Stanislaus. His research on the history of social Darwinism, evolutionary ethics, racism, and eugenics (especially in Germany from 1860 to 1945) has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He also has published four books, including From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, and Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Socialist Thought from Marx to Bernstein. Weikart is currently doing research on the ways that determinism, both biological and environmental, has shaped Western thinking regarding the value of human life.

Questions

If you have specific questions, please contact Kathy Macko at kmacko@wesleyan.edu or (860) 685-2737.