Hofstra University Joint Calendar of Events 2015-2016 Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program (LACS) & African Studies
SPRING 2016 Thursday, February 4 11:10-12:05 MONROE 142 Irene Silverblatt on “Modern Inquisitions”. She is Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Latin American Studies at Duke University, and studies how race-thinking and gender relations were integral to the making of the modern Western world, as well as how historical memory has shaped feelings of national belonging and demands for universal rights. These interests are both historical and contemporary, and have taken Silverblatt to the Inca Empire, the colonial Andes, and contemporary Central and Eastern Europe. Her goal has been to explore the profound transformations in social identities, political sensibilities, and categories of humanness. She has studied the Spanish Inquisition as a modern institution, as well as the ways in which gender constructed power relations in Inca and Colonial Peru. These concerns about the cultural expressions of power, combined with an interest in the politics of memory and its relation to art, guide her current project, focused on Central and Eastern Europe. She explores the ways in which historical memory –more specifically the holocaust— plays a role in the transformation of national ideologies, and in the conceptualization of transnational human rights. She is the author of Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World; Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru; and, more recently, Harvest of Blossoms: Poetry of a Life Cut Short, a collection of the poetry by her cousin, Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, who died in an SS labor camp in 1942. Event co-sponsored by Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Honors College, Religion Department, Jewish Studies, and Women’s Studies.
Thursday, February 18 4:30-5:55p.m. Leo Guthart Cultural Center Theater Lewis R. Gordon on “Afro-Judaism.” He is Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, with affiliations in Asian and Asian American Studies, Caribbean and Latino/a Studies, and Judaic Studies, at the University of Connecticut-Storrs. He is the author of several influential monographs, including Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1999); Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (1995); Her Majesty’s Other Children (1997); Existentia Africana (2000); Disciplinary Decadence (2006); An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (2008); and, with Jane Anna Gordon, Of Divine Warning:
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