Audio Recording of December 7th Meeting – Judith Jones

Audio recording of the December 7th Sawyer Seminar Meeting with Judith Jones is now available: Judith Jones Audio Recording

Talk by Judith Jones on Wednesday, December 7th at 4:30pm

On Wednesday, December 7th from 4:30pm-6:30pm in Friedl 225, Judith Jones (Philosophy, Fordham University) will lead a discussion of her paper, “Provocative Expression: Transitions In and From Metaphysics in Whitehead’s Later Work”.

The paper can be found here:

• Jones, Judith. “Provocative Expression: Transitions In and From Metaphysics in Whitehead’s Later Work”

Coffee and afternoon refreshments will be available.

Audio Recording of December 1st Meeting – Cary Wolfe

Audio recording of the December 1st Sawyer Seminar Meeting with Cary Wolfe is now available: Cary Wolfe Seminar Recording

Talk by Cary Wolfe on December 1st at 4:30pm

On Thursday, December 1st from 4:30pm-6:30pm in Friedl 225, Cary Wolfe (English, Rice University) will lead a discussion of his paper, “Animal Dasein”.

The paper can be found here:

• Wolfe, Cary. “Animal Dasein” (Excerpt from Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame, University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2012)

Coffee and afternoon refreshments will be available.

Also of interest, Cary Wolfe’s talk at UNC last Spring: Humans and Animals in a Biopolitical Frame and the first hour of his seminar on posthumanism as well as the somewhat related event on December 8th – Ackland Film Festival Presents Animals and Cinema

Talk by Ralph Pred on November 3rd at 4:30pm

On Thursday, November 3rd from 4:30pm-6:30pm in Friedl 225, Ralph Pred (independent scholar) will lead a discussion of his paper, “Reinstating the vague to its proper place in our mental life: on Jamesian phenomenology and some issues in contemporary neuroscience”.

The paper can be found here:

• Pred, Ralph. “Reinstating the vague to its proper place in our mental life: on Jamesian phenomenology and some issues in contemporary neuroscience”

Coffee and afternoon refreshments will be available.

CANCELLED Talk by Didier Debaise on October 20th at 4:30pm

THIS LECTURE HAS BEEN CANCELLED.  WE WILL TRY TO RESCHEDULE ASAP.  DETAILS TBD.

On Thursday, October 20th from 4:30pm-6:30pm in Friedl 225, Didier Debaise (Philosophy, Université Libre de Bruxelles) will give the talk, “Speculative Interpretation of the Subject”.

The preparation reading for the discussion is:

• Debaise, Didier. “Life and Orders” in Chromatikon. Annuaire de la philosophie en procès – Yearbook of philosophy in Process, M. Weber (ed.),  Vol. 3, Presses Universitaires de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve.
• Debaise, Didier. “The Subjects of Nature”. Forthcoming in Pli, University of Warwick.

Coffee and afternoon refreshments will be available.

Audio Recording of October 6th Meeting – Robert Brain

Audio recording of the October 6th Sawyer Seminar Meeting with Robert Brain is now available: Robert Brain Sawyer Seminar Meeting

Related Events – Neurohumanities Research Group

The NEUROHUMANITIES RESEARCH GROUP (Duke Institute for Brain Science [DIBS] and Franklin Humanities Institute [FHI]) invites your participation in a fall 2011 semester of events on READING AND THE BRAIN

October 7

10am, FHI Garage: A Conversation with Stanislas Dehaene – faculty and graduate students welcome!
(The FHI Garage = Room C105, Bay 4, 1st Floor, Smith Warehouse)

12pm, Perkins 217: Lecture: Stanislas Dehaene, “Reading in the Brain”

Stanislas Dehaene, Professor and Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the Collège de France, outlines a “neuro-cultural” approach to reading. As Oliver Sacks notes of Reading in the Brain, “The act of reading is so easily taken for granted that we forget what an astounding feat it is. How can a few black marks on white paper evoke an entire universe of meanings?” Dehaene’s paradigm of reading has been featured on NPR and a host of other media venues.

* Co-sponsored by the Center for French and Francophone Studies

Optional Preparatory Reading, Introduction and Chapter 1 from Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain available here.
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November 3

2pm, FHI Garage: Natalie Phillips, “Attention and Distraction: A Cognitive Approach to Literary Focus”

Natalie Phillips, Assistant Professor of English at Michigan State University, specializes in distraction in 18th-century British literature and culture, and in cognitive approaches to literature. Her first book project, Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature, explores how changing Enlightenment ideas about the unfocused mind reshaped literary form, arguing that descriptions of distraction in fiction advanced—and often complicated—scientific theories of concentration.  She is also developing and conducting an fMRI study at the Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging on neural differences between different levels of attention in the reading of fiction.

Her talk, “Attention and Distraction: A Cognitive Approach to Literary Focus,” brings together two crucial impulses in cognitive cultural studies—the history of cognition and the neuroscience of reading—to discuss a central problem in literary studies: the nature of attention.  Tracing points of connection, conflict and inspiration in two ongoing research projects on eighteenth-century concentration, she makes an argument for the methodological benefits of integrating cognitive cultural studies and eighteenth-century criticism, and explore the role of scientific methodologies in the humanities.

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December 6

12pm, FHI Garage: NRG Brownbag & Roundtable Discussion

Following up on a Nov. 12th National Endowment for the Humanities satellite panel on neuroscience and the humanities with Duke faculty Deborah Jenson, Michael Platt, and Lasana Harris, this roundtable will engage with the problem of how we read the brain, through an exploration of available technologies (including literature), dominant neuroscientific and semiotic tropes, and the ethics and politics of  literacies and “illiteracies” in world historical cultures

Talk by Robert Brain on October 6th at 4:30pm

On Thursday, October 6th from 4:30pm-6:30pm in Friedl 225, Robert Brain (History, University of British Columbia) will give the talk, “Genealogy of Zang Tumb Tumb: Experimental Phonetics, Vers Libre, and Modernist Sound Art”

The preparation reading for this talk can be found here: PDF of the talk

Talk by Thomas Pfau on September 22nd at 4:30pm

On Thursday, September 22nd from 4:30pm-6:30pm in Friedl 225 Thomas Pfau (English & German, Duke University) will present the following talk: “Disclosure: G. M. Hopkins and E. Husserl on the Phenomenology of the Image”

The preparation reading for this talk is here: Husserl, Edmund. Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory. trans. John B. Brough, Springer 2005. (pp 1-57 and 581-9)

Hope you can join us!