Center for the Humanities
Wesleyan University
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Middletown, Ct 06459-0069

Wesleyan Home → Center for the Humanities → Previous Themes → Fall 2012 Temporality

Temporality: Stasis, Repetition, Transformation

At a moment of economic, social, and political crisis this center theme asks after time: its organization and its social and political effects.  Concepts dependent on a theory of temporality stasis, change, life stages, eras, periodization, progression and regression, order, linearity, diachrony and synchrony, repetition, reiteration, duration, and rhythm are the building blocks of our contemporary social and cultural theory; time underpins our epistemological frameworks.  And, as scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and the natural sciences have demonstrated, time and temporality are intricately connected to space, to affect, to the body, to subjectivity, and to politics.  This theme brings together scholars in performance studies, feminist studies, media and film studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, anthropology, literary criticism, history, philosophy, art history, sociology, and cultural studies, and their overlapping yet distinct approaches to the critical study of time.  Within the broader field, we will focus on stasis, repetition, and transformation, examining the logics of stasis and repetition in relation to recent conceptions of subject formations and transformations.

	All lectures begin at 6 p.m. unless otherwise noted, and are held in Russell House, which is located at the corner of Washington and High streets.
September 10	Globalization and Time Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles   GO →
September 17	Chronopolitics of 19th-Century Displays of Difference Lucian Gomoll, Andrew W Mellon Post-doctoral fellow, Wesleyan   GO →
September 24	Cultural Trauma, National Memory: BDSM Play with Slavery and Fascism Margot Weiss, Wesleyan   GO →
October 1	Saving the City Elijah Huge, Wesleyan   GO →
October 8	The Times We’re In Robyn Wiegman, Duke University  GO →
October 22	Remembering the Future Karen Barad, University of California, Santa Cruz  GO →
October 29	Temporality and Normativity Joe Rouse, Wesleyan  GO →
November 5	Racial Trauma and Triangulation in Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student Amy Tang, Wesleyan  GO →
November 12	“Minerals Alone Escape It”: Mourning Time Lisa Cohen, Wesleyan  GO →
November 19	Latency as Origin of Our Present. Conjectures about a New Social Construction of Time Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University  GO →
November 26	Ten Digital Preludes Tom Boellstorff, University of California, Irvine  GO →
December 3	Law, Ornament, and the Quotidian Body Anne Cheng, Princeton University  GO →