FALL 2025

Genres of Proof

What genres does proof assume as it formulates, circulates, and structures knowledge production?  If proof often presents itself as incontrovertible evidence that substantiates or debunks truth claims across an array of historical, social, and political contexts, it is nonetheless conceptually evasive:  in a scientific and mathematical frame it refers not to evidence itself, but to a means of making evident or clear that which must be or is necessarily true.  In a juridical frame, standards of proof have been enshrined to structure how evidence is introduced into arguments and considered by jurists and juries.  Genres of proof are also marked by their conceptual entanglement with the history of print: ‘artist’s proof’ and ‘galley proof’ refer to the evolving sequence of impressions made as working drafts of a text or image.  On what grounds and in what forms does proof gain its evidentiary and expressive powers?  This semester’s theme probes genres of proof and the epistemic conditions and social processes that make them legible within different interpretive communities.  How have the humanities, social sciences, and the arts grappled with the legacies and evidentiary practices of empiricism?  What work do genres of proof––court transcripts, receipts, timestamped documents, tissue samples, call logs, witness testimonies––perform?  What cultural forms, rituals, and fantasies undergird the evidentiary and probative practices of economies, sciences, and state formations?  And in what ways do matters of proof matter for the work of scholarship itself?  What forms of proof might be needed to account for archival silences, the unrecoverable and unprovable, or counter- and post-factualisms?  This theme invites inquiries into the histories, aesthetics, and embodiments of proof and provocations regarding what it might offer our scholarly commitments to methods and genres of truth-telling.

Lectures 

All lectures begin at 5 p.m. in Room 100 of The Frank Center for Public Affairs unless otherwise noted.