University of Lausanne, 14-15 September 2023
INVITED Speakers
J.M. Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940 and educated at the University of Cape Town and the University of Texas, where he earned his PhD in 1968.
During a lengthy academic career he held professorial appointments at the University of Cape Town and the University of Chicago, as well as visiting appointments at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, and Stanford University.
He has published nineteen works of fiction, as well as literary criticism and translations. Among the awards he has won are the Booker Prize (twice) and, in 2003, the Nobel Prize for Literature.
He lives in Adelaide, South Australia, where he is Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide.
N. Katherine Hayles is the Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University. Her research focuses on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her twelve print books include Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational (Columbia, 2021), Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017) and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Univ. of Chicago Press 2015), in addition to over 100 peer-reviewed articles. Her books have won several prizes, including The Rene Wellek Award for the Best Book in Literary Theory for How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Literature, Cybernetics and Informatics, and the Suzanne Langer Award for Writing Machines. She has been recognized by many fellowships and awards, including two NEH Fellowships, a Guggenheim, a Rockefellar Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, and two University of California Presidential Research Fellowships. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is currently at work on Technosymbiosis: Futures of the Human.
Andrea Henderson is professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life (Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her latest essay, “Victorian Equations,” is forthcoming in Critical Inquiry (winter 2024).
One of the outstanding poets of her generation, Susan Howe is known for innovative verse that crosses media and disciplines. Layered and allusive, her work draws on early American history and primary documents, weaving quotation and image into poems that are often strikingly experimental with typography. Author of numerous books of poetry and two of literary criticism, Susan Howe's collection of poems, That This won the Bollingen Prize in 2011. In 2017 she received the Robert Frost award for distinguished lifetime achievement in American poetry. Her earlier critical study, My Emily Dickinson, was re-issued in 2007 with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger. Her volume, Tom Tit Tot with art work by R.H. Quaytman was published by MoMA in a limited edition titled Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives. She has released several CDs - in collaboration with the musician/composer David Grubbs, including Thiefth, Souls of the Labadie Tract, Frolic Architecture, and WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER. Her selected essays, The Quarry, was published in 2015, and a volume of poems, Debths, in 2017. Debths won the Griffith Award for Poetry in Canada in 2018. Her most recent collection of poems Concordance was published in 2022 by New Directions.
Susan Howe earned a degree from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts in 1961. She also studied acting in Dublin, following in the footsteps of her mother, Mary Manning, an actress at the Gate Theatre, in Dublin. She went on to hold the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities at the State University New York at Buffalo until her retirement in 2007. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999 and served as a Chancellor to the Academy of American Poets between 2000-2006. In 2009 she was awarded a Fellowship to the American Academy at Berlin. She has been a distinguished fellow at the Stanford Institute of the Humanities; and at the Universities of Princeton, Chicago, Utah and Wesleyan, as well as the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and Artist In Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. She lives in Guilford, CT.
Marjorie Perloff is Sadie D. Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She is also Florence Scott professor Emerita of English at the University of Southern California. Perloff is the author of many books and articles on 20th and 21st century Poetry and Poetics, including, Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters (1977), The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1992), Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996), 21st Century Modernism (2002), Unoriginal Genius: Writing by Other Means in the New Century (2011), and, most recently Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics (2021). She is also the author of a memoir, The Vienna Paradox (2004), and the first English translation/edition of Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks 1914-16 (Liveright, 2022). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on modern German philosophy, two books on philosophy and literature, Henry James and Modern Moral Life and Metaphysical Exile: On J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus Fictions; a book on modernist art, After the Beautiful, and five books on film and philosophy. He is a past winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, a Guggenheim Fellowship, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the American Philosophical Society, and is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina. His latest book is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press: The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism and the Fate of Philosophy.