The Mandel Humanities Center’s Contemporaneity Working Group wishes to extend an open invitation to join us this semester. We meet for an hour and a half three times a semester, usually in the Mandel Humanities Center, to to eat snacks, share common readings, discuss works in progress, and/or respond to presentations.
We’re an informal interdisciplinary group in conception–in the past we’ve had participants and presentations from the departments of English, History, Anthropology, and Latin American studies–and we try to cover a wide range of topics and readings. Generally the aim of a meeting is to introduce an emerging idea or topic (usually by reading a couple of articles) and spend the bulk of our time discussing its relation or application across a number of disciplines. Past discussion topics have included cultural expressions of neoliberalism, postmodernity and the New Sincerity, the culture of debt, urbanism, continental philosophy and love, and the transnational novel. Our schedule for this semester is as follows:
September: “Television, Time, and Genre” Matthew Schratz (English)
October: “Canon Formation in the Academy” Matthew Linton (History)
November: “Anthropocene, New Materialism” Michaela Henry (English)
If you’re interested in joining us or in proposing a topic of discussion, please contact us at kcavende at brandeis dot edu or mschratz at brandeis dot edu. We look forward to meeting many of you in the coming months.
