Keynote Speakers

Frieda Ekotto

Frieda Ekotto has been a Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan since 1994. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Ford Foundation seed grant for research and collaborative work with institutions of higher learning in Africa. She is the author of several books, including L'Ecriture carcérale et le discours juridique: Jean Genet (2001), Rethinking Third Cinema (2009), and Race and Sex across the French Atlantic (2011). Ekotto has lectured throughout the United States and in Australia, Algeria, Cameroon, Cuba, Canada, England, France, Ivory Coast, Malaysia, Malta, Nigeria, Tunisia, South Africa, and Singapore (among other countries); and she has held faculty and leadership positions at the Concordia Language Villages in Minnesota, the University of Technology in Sydney, Sichuan University, and the Consortium of Universities of Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan in Aix-en-Provence, France.

Keynote Address: TBA

GEOFFREY BENNINGTON

Geoffrey Bennington is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University in Georgia, United States, and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, as well as a member of the International College of Philosophy in Paris. His more recent publications include Scatter 2: Politics in Deconstruction (2021), Kant on the Frontier: Philosophy, Politics, and the Ends of the Earth (2017), and Scatter I: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida (2016). Bennington is also the translator of works by Derrida, Lyotard and other French thinkers. He is a member of the French editorial team preparing Jacques Derrida's seminars for publication, and General Editor with Peggy Kamuf of the English translation of those seminars (for the University of Chicago Press). Concurrently, he is completing a book of essays in the wake of the Scatter project, entitled Down to Dust, and a monograph on the German philologist Paul Friedländer’s disagreement with Heidegger over the interpretation of the Greek aletheia.

Keynote Address: TBA

Jane Bennett

Jane Bennett is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. She is one of the founders of the journal Theory & Event and edited the journal Political Theory: An International Journal of Political Philosophy from 2012-17. Bennett specializes in the environmental humanities, political philosophy, nature-writing, American romanticism, political rhetoric and persuasion, and contemporary social thought. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Copenhagen, at Oxford University (Keble College), at Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (University of London), and at the Humanities Research Centre at Australian National University, at Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany. Her publications include The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001), Vibrant Matter (2010), and Influx & Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman (2020).

Keynote Address: TBA