MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | DOING NOTHING/NOTHING DOING | SPRING 2026

The Inertia Apparatus: Furnishing Repose and Refusal

This talk is an experiment in conceptual joinery: it dovetails a decade-long research project about the intellectual history of furniture design with a more immediate and embodied concern about the politics of academic labor. Both fields — furniture manufacturing and higher education — have prioritized the creation of apparatae to maximize efficiency and productivity. But when we reach the limits of our cognitive and physical capacity, when we exhaust our storage space, we often assume that personal remedies (e.g., boundary-setting, task-management, file-purging) will solve systemic crises. In this talk I’ll survey recent research on burnout, workload inequity, and the attrition of senior women in the academy — all of which contextualize my own recent decision to resign prematurely from a full, endowed presidential professorship. On a parallel track, I’ll explore the politics of labor, pleasures, and existential values and eschatologies embodied in furnishings that empower the idler and outfit the quitter. Think: beds, chaise lounges, pool floats, and artists’ furnishings built for dysfunction. How might we design strategies and structures that facilitate repose, recess, refusal, and reparation — in part by redistributing physical and cognitive load from the individual to the institution?

Doing Nothing/Nothing Doing
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Center for the Humanities · 95 Pearl Street, Middletown, CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/humanities