Distinguished Visiting Speaker Series

A series of interdisciplinary talks and seminars for graduate researchers and staff at the University of Glasgow. More about the speakers here.

In 2010:

28 January 2010: Michael Wood (Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University): 'Close Readings of the Third Kind'

15 March 2010: Reina Lewis (Artscom Centenary Professor of Cultural Studies, The University of the Arts, London): 'Islam and Fashion: Marketing Muslim Lifestyles'

12 May 2010: Thomas Laqueur (Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor, Department of History, University of California Berkeley): 'Cremation and the Work of the Dead in the Nineteenth Century'

7th June 2010: W. J. T. Mitchell (Professor of English and Art History, The University of Chicago): 'Idolatry:  Nietzsche, Blake, Poussin'

(Time: 5.15pm. Venue: Wolfson Medical School, 38 University Avenue)

In 2008-09:

15 May 2008: James Grantham Turner (Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley): ‘Eros and Invention in Renaissance Visual Culture: Notes of an Accidental Art Historian’

29 May 2008: Knud Haakonssen (Professor of Intellectual History, University of Sussex): ‘Francis Hutcheson and the Scottish Enlightenment: Rights, Toleration and the Question of Subscription’

16 October 2008: Jean-Michel Rabaté (Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania): 'Excessive Form: Formalism and Its Discontents' 

13-14 February 2009: Alain Badiou (École Normale Supérieure): "A Discussion of Incident at Antioch"

26 February 2009: Mary Beard (Professor of Classics, Newnham College, Cambridge): "Joking Apart: Making Sense of a Late Roman Joke"

7 July 2009: Olive Senior (Jamaican poet and novelist) "Hearing Voices: Inviting the Outsiders into the Text"

In 2007:

13-14 December (co-hosted by the School of Law): Dame Gillian Beer (University of Cambridge): 'Darwin and the Consciousness of Others'; Barbara Maria Stafford (William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor, Emerita, The University of Chicago): 'Moral Grammar: Towards an Evolutionary Biology of Images' (opening and closing talks for the 'Philosophy and Ethics' workshop, part of the 'Species of Origin' programme, co-sponsored by the AHRC)

25 October: Simon Schaffer (Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge): ‘Asiatic Enlightenment and British Myth’

12 June:   Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University): ‘Thinking about the Humanities’

24 May: Stephen Brookfield (Distinguished University Professor, University of St. Thomas Minneapolis, Minnesota): ‘Adult Education as Political Detoxification’

17 May: Simon Goldhill (Professor of Greek Literature and Culture, King’s College, Cambridge): ‘Waterhouse, Warhol and Other Victorians: The Classical Body and the Image of Desire’

In 2006:

21 November: Hermione Lee (Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford): ‘Edith Wharton and the First World War’

25 May: Elaine Scarry (Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Harvard University): ‘Thinking in Emergency’. Read a transcript of the seminar with Elaine Scarry

10 May: Michael Rowlands (Professor of Material Culture, University College London): ‘Heritage Memory and the Postcolonial Museum’

4 May: Dame Olwen Hufton (Leverhulme Research Professor of History, Merton College, Oxford):  ‘Pigs and Lace’:  Women, Money and Change in Nineteenth-Century Europe