Geoffrey Bennington

Asa G. Chandler Professor of Modern French Thought, Department of French and Italian, Emory University

“Living Off”

Asa G. Candler Professor of Modern French Thought at Emory University; Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School; member of the French Editorial Team translating Jacques Derrida’s Seminars (about 40 volumes) for publication (Galilée); and General Editor, with Peggy Kamuf, of the English translation of Derrida’s Seminars (Chicago UP), Bennington is widely known for his translations of, and expertise in, the works of Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. In 1991 he co-authored with Derrida Jacques Derrida, which comprises two texts, Bennington’s “Derridabase” appearing on the upper two-thirds of the book’s pages, and Derrida’s “Circumfession” on the lower third of each page. In such projects as Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction (1994) and the recent Scatter (e.g., Scatter 1: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida, Fordham UP, 2016), he brings deconstruction together with the question of the political.

Alyson Brickey

Instructor, Department of English, University of Toronto

Graduate Student Panel

Dr. Alyson Brickey, a former Mosaic student intern and graduate of the Department of English, Film, and Theatre at the University of Manitoba, recently graduated with a PhD from the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Her work focuses on British and American modernism and critical theory, including works by Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Herman Melville. Her PhD dissertation, titled “Fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth”: Lists in American Literature, 1851-1955, traces an aesthetics of list-making in six American texts, ranging from Melville’s Moby Dick to Ginsberg’s Howl.

Antonio Calcagno

Professor, Department of Philosophy, Western University

“On the Possibility of World”

Dr. Antonio Calcagno is Full Professor of Philosophy at King’s College at Western University and Co-Director of the Centre for Advanced Research in European Philosophy. His scholarship focuses on themes of recent and contemporary European philosophy, Mediaeval and Renaissance philosophy, and social and political thought. He works on questions of community and intersubjectivity, statehood, interiority, consciousness, humanism, and post-humanism. Dr. Calcagno’s work follows Hannah Arendt in attempting to develop a philosophical concept of interiority that tries to analyze what it is for us to have and experience, meaningfully, an interior world. His most recent book, Thinking About Love, co-edited with Diane Enns, takes up the nature and experience of love with reference to some of our best-known continental philosophers.

Diane Enns

Professor, Department of Philosophy, McMaster University

“In Spite of the World”

Diane Enns is Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University. She is the author of Love in the Dark: Philosophy By Another Name; The Violence of Victimhood; and Speaking of Freedom: Philosophy, Politics and the Struggle for Liberation. She is currently working on the theme of community and alienation.

Ryan Fics

PhD candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, Emory University

Graduate Student Panel

Ryan Fics is a former Mosaic student intern and graduate of the Department of Religion at the University of Manitoba. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University. His research focuses primarily on 19th- and 20th-century continental philosophy, ethics, critical animal studies, political theology, biopolitics, sovereignty, psychoanalysis, Greek and Roman mythology, and the genre of the fable.

Daniel T. Fischlin

University Research Chair and Professor, School of English and Theatre Studies, University of Guelph

“Moving On. . . Improvisation and Global Sites of Difference or. . . Some Parables Verging on a Theory of Interdisciplinarity”

University Research Chair and Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, Director of the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project, and researcher and editor with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, Dr. Daniel Fischlin’s books include The Community of Rights: The Rights of Community (with Martha Nandorfy; Oxford UP, 2012), Rebel Musics: Human Rights, Resistant Sounds, and the Politics of Music Making (with Ajay Heble; Black Rose, 2003), and The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (with Ajay Heble; Duke UP, 2013). Among his remarkable interdisciplinary engagements are those that approach music as a model of social practice.

Gwynne Fulton

PhD candidate in Philosophy, Art History and Curatorial Studies, Concordia University

Graduate Student Panel

Gwynne Fulton is an interdisciplinary doctoral candidate in philosophy, art history, and curatorial studies at Concordia University. Her research examines psychoanalysis, film theory, photography, deconstruction, political sovereignty, and contemporary image-based media arts.

Peggy Kamuf

Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French, Department of French and Italian, University of Southern California

“Literal Life”

Dr. Peggy Kamuf has written extensively on the work of Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and Jean-Luc Nancy and translated a number of their texts. Book of Addresses (2005) gathers essays on fictionality, sexual difference, psychoanalysis, and literary theory around the figure of the address of speech and writing and To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida (2010) collects ten years of her writings on Derrida. She has also edited several collections of work by Derrida: A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (1991), Without Alibi (2002), and Psyche: Inventions of the Other (2007). She is a co-editor of the series The Seminars of Jacques Derrida at University of Chicago Press and is a member of the editorial board of Oxford Literary Review.

Axelle Karera

Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Wesleyan University

“Asymmetries of Suffering: Race and the Visual Scenes of Exile”

Dr. Axelle Karera is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Wesleyan University. Her research focuses on the critical philosophy of race and examines its marginalization in academia. Her most recent work on the topic engages race, climate change, and the representation of exile. Dr. Karera has also written about language and Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari.

David Farrell Krell

Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University; Brauer Distinguished Visiting Professor of German Studies, Brown University

“Living On—With Monsters”

Dr. David Farrell Krell is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University and Brauer Distinguished Visiting Professor of German Studies at Brown University. His philosophical work focuses on the areas of early Greek thought, German romanticism and idealism, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida. His most recent academic books include a translation and critical edition of Hölderlin’s The Death of Empedocles (State U of New York P, 2008) along with the books Derrida and Our Animal Others (Indiana UP, 2013); Phantoms of the Other: Four Generations of Derrida’s Geschlecht; and Ecstasy, Catastrophe: Heidegger from Being and Time to the Black Notebooks (both State U of New York P, 2015). He has also published a number of short stories and three novels.

Alphonso Lingis

Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University

“A Hard and Brutal Mysticism”

Dr. Alphonso Lingis is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He is an internationally renowned phenomenologist who has published innovative work on art, architecture, sculpture, animality, embodiment, and continental philosophy. He has translated works by Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He has travelled to many of the world’s most impoverished and overlooked places as part of his ongoing attempt to articulate a theory of community not rooted in some privileged ideal of sameness. Some of his publications include Excesses: Eros and Culture, Dangerous Emotions, and, most recently, Violence and Splendor.

Riley McGuire

PhD candidate, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania

Graduate Student Panel

Riley McGuire, a former Mosaic student intern and a graduate of the Department of English, Film, and Theatre at the University of Manitoba, is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies Victorian literature, queer theory, popular culture, and representations of voice and speech pathology. Riley is currently one of the co-ordinators of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Reading Group.

Danielle Meijer

Adjunct Professor, Department of Philosophy, DePaul University

“Herzensschatzi Komm: Our Future Handedness and Collaborative Beeing”

Danielle Meijer is Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University, director of Aleph World Fusion Dance in Chicago, and an accomplished traditional dancer. She specializes in the classical dances of South India, Java, and Bali; Turkish cabaret; and American tribal-style belly dance.

Patricia Patkau

Professor Emeritus, School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of British Columbia; Patkau Architects, Vancouver

“Work/Play”

Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and the Royal Institute of British Architects, and member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art, Patricia Patkau began her award-winning career in Winnipeg, graduating with a Bachelor of Interior Design in 1974 from the University of Manitoba (where she also met her husband and business partner, John Patkau) before completing her Master of Architecture in 1978 at Yale University and opening Patkau Architects in Edmonton, Alberta that same year. In 2004 she was named a Member of the Order of Canada. She has lectured extensively across Canada, the United States, and Europe and is Professor Emeritus at the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia. Since Patkau Architects moved to Vancouver in 1984, she has won 13 Governor General’s Medals in Architecture, including one for Winnipeg’s Millennium Library and one for the University of Manitoba’s ARTlab, collaborating with Winnipeg’s LM Architects on both projects. Patkau’s buildings engage architecture as a critical cultural activity necessarily responsive to ecological concerns and sustainability.

Carrie Reese

PhD candidate, Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto

Graduate Student Panel

Carrie Reese is a doctoral candidate at the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Her work focuses on deconstruction and media, post-World War II French cinema and television, the politics of space and place, and globalization. Her work also considers cross-cultural film-making and directors who work in more than one national cinema.

Nicholas Royle

Professor, Department of English, University of Sussex

“Quicksand”

Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He is the author of numerous books, including Telepathy and Literature (1991), The Uncanny (2003), Jacques Derrida (2003), How to Read Shakespeare (2005), and Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011). He is co-author (with Andrew Bennett) of This Thing Called Literature (2015) and An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (5th edition, 2016). Dr. Royle has also published two novels, Quilt (2010) and An English Guide to Birdwatching (2017). He is an editor of the Oxford Literary Review.

Elizabeth Rottenberg

Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, DePaul University

“What are the Chances? Psychoanalysis and Telepathy”

Dr. Elizabeth Rottenberg is Associate Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. Her research focuses on contemporary French philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. She has translated works by Jean-François Lyotard, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida. Dr. Rottenberg is a founding member of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project. She is the author of Inheriting the Future: Legacies of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert and is currently working on a book entitled For the Love of Psychoanalysis.

H. Peter Steeves

Professor, Department of Philosophy, DePaul University

“Herzensschatzi Komm: Our Future Handedness and Collaborative Beeing”

Dr. H. Peter Steeves is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University and Director of the DePaul Humanities Center. His general research areas range from phenomenology (especially the work of Edmund Husserl), applied ethics (especially animal and environmental ethics), social-political philosophy (especially communitarianism), and the philosophy of science and of culture to astrobiology, pre-biotic chemistry, cosmology, and the origins of the universe. Some of his book publications include Founding Community: A Phenomenological-Ethical Inquiry; Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life; The Things Themselves: Phenomenology and the Return to the Everyday; and Being and Showtime: Performance Scripts of the Hardest Working Man in Academia (forthcoming).

Lidwien van de Ven

“Lidwien van de Ven: Living On”

Lidwien van de Ven is a Dutch artist who lives and works in Berlin and Rotterdam. She has received numerous awards for her photographs and installations, most recently, the Dolf Henkes Prize in 2014. Van de Ven exhibits on international platforms, reaching global audiences. Her work was included in the Sydney Biennale, Australia (2006), Documenta 12 in Kassel (2007), and the Busan Biennale in South Korea (2012). She has exhibited at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid (2014), Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2014), and, most recently, she has been working on a long-term research commission for the Van Abbe museum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Her exhibition FRAGMENTS [of a desire for revolution] explores Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. It opened at the Van Abbe in January 2017.