2021-22 Speaker Series
Each year The Speaker Series brings in several visiting guest lecturers. Speakers over the years have included Jean Baudrillard, Lauren Berlant, Peter Brooks, Norman Bryson, David Carroll, Anthony Cascardi, Wlad Godzich, Jean-Joseph Goux, Elizabeth Grosz, N. Katherine Hayles, Linda Hutcheon, Martin Jay, Michael Hardt, Agnes Heller, Barbara Johnson, David Farrell Krell, Murray Krieger, Arthur Kroker, Dominick LaCapra, Jerome McGann, J. Hillis Miller, Chantal Mouffe, Christopher Norris, Mark Poster, Richard Rorty, Charles Scott, Thomas Sebeok, Kaja Silverman, Gayatri Spivak, Bernard Stiegler, Samuel Weber, Hayden White, Slavoj Žižek, and many others.
Upcoming speakers:
April 20, 2022
4:00 p.m. EST
Eldritch Priest
Professor in The School for Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University
"Presque Rêvé (or, To Want To Be a Metaphor)"
In his recent book Earworm and Event (Duke UP 2022), Eldritch Priest explores music, daydreams, and other imaginary refrains to address what might be called “the earworm unconscious.” Playing fast and loose with concepts drawn from a variety of sources including animal studies, process philosophy, stand-up comedy, philosophy of language, stream of consciousness, and neuroscience, Priest rebels against certain of the metaphysical distractions of recent sound studies but also the sober remit of the cognitive sciences, both of which overlook just how weird and funny earworms are. That said, this talk will not be about the earworm per se. Instead, through a reverie on reverie, Priest considers the infectious refrain of daydreaming from an idle pastime to an addictive meantime that signals the outbreak of an oneiric contagion.
Join us via Zoom
https://westernuniversity.zoom.us/j/96932295299
PASSCODE: 828615
Contact theory@uwo.ca for more info
Watch some of our previous talks on YouTube
Past Speakers:
April 13, 2022
March 17, 2022
March 3, 2022
December 3, 2021
November 19, 2021
April 29, 2021
April 23, 2021
April 6, 2021