Critical Theory Workshop

Lecture
Thursday, October 8
4:30–6:00pm

Friedl 225

Seminar
Friday, October 9
10:30am–12:30pm
Jameson Gallery (Friedl 115)
(register for details and readings)

Monogamy and its Discontents
Evren Savcı

Evren Savcı is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her first book Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (2021, DUP) analyzes sexual politics under contemporary Turkey’s AKP regime with an eye to the travel and translation of sexual political vocabulary. Her second book project, Monogamy and its Discontents, turns to the political economy of monogamy through an investigation of two of its alternatives, polygamy and polyamory in contemporary Turkey. She is the co-editor of the South Atlantic Quarterly special issue “Transnational Queer Materialism” with Rana M. Jaleel (UC Davis), and the forthcoming JMEWS special issue “Wordmaking/Worldmaking: Languages, Movements, Materialisms” with Beshouy Botros (Yale). Her work on the intersections of language, knowledge, sexual politics, neoliberalism and religion has appeared in Journal of Marriage and the Family, Ethnography, Sexualities, Political Power and Social Theory, Theory & Event, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, GLQ, and New Perspectives on Turkey, and in several edited collections. Savcı received her Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Southern California. Following her Ph.D., she was a postdoctoral fellow at The Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN).

Jameson–Ljubljana Symposium

Thursday, October 29

Friedl 225

4:30–6:00pm: Mladen Dolar

6:00–6:45pm: reception

Friday, October 30

Friedl Jameson Gallery

10:30–11:00am: Bara Kolenc

11:15–11:45am: Gregor Moder
12:00–12:30pm: Jure Simoniti

12:45-1:30pm: lunch

1:30–2:30pm: roundtable, moderated by Michael Hardt and Ranjana Khanna

Repetition, Contingency, Dialectic
Mladen Dolar, Bara Kolenc, Gregor Moder, Jure Simoniti 

Mladen Dolar, born in Maribor, Slovenia, is a senior research fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Dolar’s area of research is within German classical philosophy, German idealism, theoretical psychoanalysis, structuralism, and the philosophy of music and film.

Bara Kolenc is a performance artist and philosopher from Ljubljana, Slovenia. She holds a PhD in Philosophy and works as a researcher at the University of Ljubljana.

Gregor Moder teaches philosophy of art at the University of Ljubljana and is the author of Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity (Northwestern University Press, 2017).

Jure Simoniti is a researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Critical Theory Workshop

Lecture

Thursday, February 18
4:30–6:00pm
Friedl 225

Seminar

Friday, February 19
10:30am–12:30pm

Donna V. Jones

Donna V. Jones is an associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include the literature of the Americas and African Diaspora, postcolonial literature and critical theory. Her publication The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism and Modernity (2010) was awarded the Jeanne and Aldo Scaglione Prize. Professor Jones is currently working on two projects,  The Ambiguous Promise of European Decline: Race and Historical Pessimism in the Era of the Great War and The Tribunal of Life: Reflections on Vitalism, Race and Biopolitics.

Critical Theory Workshop

Lecture

Thursday, March 18
4:30–6:00pm

Friedl 225

Seminar

Friday, March 19
10:30am–12:30pm

Zahid R. Chaudhary

Zahid R. Chaudhary specializes in postcolonial studies, visual culture, and critical theory. His first book, Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India, provides a historical and philosophical account of early photography in India, analyzing how aesthetic experiments in colonial photographic practice shed light on the changing nature of perception and notions of truth, memory, and embodiment. His second book, Paranoid Publics: Psychopolitics of Truth (Fordham UP, 2025) is a psychosocial account of contemporary cultural politics, including conspiracy cultures, anti-democratic social movements, and new media networks. His third book (in progress), “Impunity: Notes on a Global Tendency,” analyzes juridical, economic, political, and aesthetic aspects of the practices of impunity from the Cold War to the present, from postcolonial states to the United States. The book considers documentary film, contemporary art, development projects, and the rise of “Big Tech.” He was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2023–24. He has published widely on visual culture, photography, film, and psychoanalysis.