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Birkbeck celebrates the ‘Public Intellectual’

The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities was established in 2004 to consolidate the Faculty of Arts as an international centre of research excellence and aims to promote new ideas, forms of understanding and practices in the study of society and culture.  Since its conception the Institute has hosted and contributed to a number of successful events, including the ‘Adieu, Derrida’ lecture series in spring 2005.

This exciting new initiative within Birkbeck College has a wider public remit in promoting the role of the public intellectual. Our planned events for 2006 include:

‘Does the body have a future?’

A series of conferences and workshops at Birkbeck, University of London
Workshops 2 and 3: ‘Bodies Present’ and ‘Bodies Future’, March 2006, dates and venues tbc.

In concepts as diverse as the cyborg, the questioning of mind/body dualism, the contemporary image of the suicide bomber and the patenting of human genes, we can identify ways in which the future of the human body has become ambiguous.  The aim of these three international workshops and conferences is to explore interdisciplinary answers to the question ‘Does the body have a future?’  The first of these workshops, ‘Bodies Past’, asked what the past history of the body could tell us about that question.  Bodies ‘Present’ and ‘Future’ focus on the state of the body in today’s climate, and the implications this might have for its future.

Cultural Conservatism, Economic Progressivism? The Legacy of the New York Intellectuals

24th-25th May 2006, time and venue tbc.

During the inter-war period, a number of New York-based, predominantly second-generation Jewish, writers emerged as avatars of an anti-Stalinist socialism. Coalescing around the journal Partisan Review in the late 1930s, figures like Philip Rahv, and, somewhat later, Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer, carved out a distinct intellectual niche for themselves.

This conference will examine whether we can chart the emergence of a distinct blend of secular-cultural conservatism and economic progressivism in the writings of Bell and other New York Intellectuals. We will also explore the links with latter-day ‘neoconservatism’.

Slavoj Zizek Masterclass 2006 on Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction

to be held at Birkbeck, University of London, May 2006, dates tbc.

The four-week course will provide a Lacanian reading of four domains of humanities and social sciences: first week, philosophy and theology (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger); second week, science (contemporary cognitivists and evolutionists, from Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker); third week, theories of ideology (from Marx to analysing today’s ‘fundamentalism’); last week, theories of art (cinema and literature: Henry James, Samuel Beckett, David Lynch, Lars von Trier).

Events in the latter half of the year will be advertised on this website nearer the time.

The Institute also provides interdisciplinary training and is currently running a series of seminars for postgraduate students.  Click here http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bih/activities/fostering.shtml to find out more.

For general enquiries about the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities please contact Natalie Warner, Institute Administrator at n.warner(at)bbk.ac.uk.