Updated Schedule and Format, Registration Information
Panel 1: “Critical Theory in Light of October 7”
The first panel in our series of webinars in response to October 7 will take place on Sunday, January 7, 2024, at noon Eastern Standard Time. Register for the webinar here.
In light of the vigorous response we received to our recent conference announcement, the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute is enhancing the format and expanding the schedule of its initiative about Israel, Hamas, critical theory, and the university. These changes will allow us to cultivate and refine a carefully sustained conversation while events in the Middle East and on campus continue to unfold.
Rather than—as originally announced—hosting just a single, digital gathering on January 12–13, we will instead be hosting a webinar series on different aspects of the topic each month for one full year.
We continue to plan for an in-person conference on the subject as well, to be convened in early October 2024, and we expect to make an announcement about its location shortly.
All of this will lay the groundwork for a special issue of Telos in 2025. We intend for this special issue to be a distinctive memorial statement on the role of critical theory in the response to the Hamas atrocities, as well as a permanent resource for scholars and educators working to improve the intellectual and ethical environment of higher education.
“Critical Theory in Light of October 7,” the first webinar in our series, will take place on Sunday, January 7, 2024, at noon Eastern Standard Time. All panels thereafter will take place on the seventh day of each month, also at noon EST, throughout 2024. Each panel will last between 90 to 120 minutes.
Our first panel features presenters Cary Nelson and Abe Silberstein, with respondent Manuela Connsoni. Nelson’s remarks are titled “Anti-Semitism, Not Theory Itself, Is the Problem.” Silberstein will present “Whose Postcolonialism? The Coming Struggle over Palestine in the Academy.” Series organizer Gabriel Noah Brahm will moderate.
Cary Nelson was President of the American Association of University Professors from 2006 to 2012, and he is emeritus professor of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Abe Silberstein is a writer and critic based in New York. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Ha’aretz, The Forward, the Times Literary Supplement (UK), and Dissent, among other publications. Manuela Connsoni is Pela and Adam Starkopf Chair in Holocaust Studies and Director of the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Full biographies are provided below.
Registration for each panel via Eventbrite is required. Register for the upcoming panel here. All future Telos-Paul Piccone webinars will be managed through the Eventbrite portal.
After registering, you will be given an option to retrieve your tickets to the event. You will also receive a reminder via email thirty minutes before the webinar.
This event is free for participants, but as an independent, non-profit organization, the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute relies on your generosity. To donate to our efforts, click here. Donations are tax deductible in the United States.
To contact Prof. Brahm, write to brahm at telosinstitute dot net.
Full Participant Biographies
Presenters
Cary Nelson was President of the American Association of University Professors from 2006 to 2012, and he is emeritus professor of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A scholar of modern American poetry and critical theory, he is the author of Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (2001), Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (1997), and No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom (2010), among many other works. His edited and co-edited books include Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988) and Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (1994). His contributions to American academic life are the subject of Michael Rothberg and Peter Garrett, eds., Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University: Poetry, Politics, and the Profession (2009).
Abe Silberstein is a writer and critic based in New York. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Ha’aretz, The Forward, Tel Aviv Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement (UK), Dissent, London Review of Books, War on the Rocks, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Israel Policy Exchange. He manages English-language communications for a non-governmental organization committed to building a shared society of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Respondent
Manuela Connsoni is Pela and Adam Starkopf Chair in Holocaust Studies and Director of the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Three Faces of Antifascism: Narratives of Resistance in Italian Political Culture (2023), Primo Levi as Job in Search of his Roots. On Evil, Suffering and Survival after the Camps (in press), and Resistenza or Holocaust? The Memory of the Deportation and Extermination in Italy, 1945–1985 (2010). Her co-edited books include Witnessing the Witness of War Crimes, Mass Murder, and Genocide: From the 1920s to the Present (2023) and Sartre, the Jew and the Other: Rethinking Antisemitism, Race and Gender (2020). She is editor in chief of the Vidal Sassoon Studies in Antisemitism, Racism and Prejudice book series and of the journal Analysis of Current Trends in Antisemitism-ACTA. She is currently at work on two books that grow from a study of Julius Evola.
Moderator and Host
Gabiel Noah Brahm is Professor of English and World Literature at Northern Michigan University, and currently serves as the Hochberg Family Library Scholar-in-Residence at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) in Miami Beach, Florida. He has been appointed as a visiting scholar at the University of Haifa’s Herzl Institute for the Study of Zionism, the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University, the Program in Philosophy and Religions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Yad Vashem (World Holocaust Remembrance Center). He is co-editor (with Cary Nelson) of The Case against Academic Boycotts of Israel, and a frequent contributor to leading journals of social theory and political commentary, such as Telos, Fathom, The American Mind, Society, and Perspectives on Political Science.
excellent discussion and needed!