Colloquia & Public Events
Colloquia Series
2025-26
SEPTEMBER
- Thursday 18th: Karen Ng (Vanderbilt University) presenting - "What is the Gattungsprozess? Social Freedom and Social Reproduction in Hegel and Marx"
- Location: White Hall Rm. 111
- Time: 4:00 pm
- Thursday 25th: Michael Eng (Appalachia State) presenting - "Digital Wynter: Sylvia Wynter and the Digital Prehistories of Race"
- Location: White Hall Rm. 206
- Time: 4:00 pm
OCTOBER
- Thursday 16th: Kate Davies (UT Dallas) presenting - "Fostering Antigone"
- Time: 4:00pm
- Location: White Hall Rm. 206
- William F. Edwards Lecture
The experience of children who are held in state custody remains undertheorized in philosophy. The foster care system, as it is commonly called, consolidates many debates about the meaning of home, care, family, criminalization, and more. This presentation explores the conflict between the family and the state over separated children by exploring their positionality through political philosophy, feminist and queer theory, and Sophocles’ Antigone.
NOVEMBER
- Thursday 20th: Eric Santner (University of Chicago) presenting - "The Decreation of World: Rilke, Heidegger, Arendt"
- Time: 4:00pm
- Location: White Hall Rm. 111
FEBRUARY
- Thursday 26th:Calvin Warren (Emory University)
MARCH
- Thursday 19th:Nicolas De Warren (Penn State)
APRIL
- Thursday 16th: TBD
2024-25
SEPTEMBER
- Thursday 19th:“Embodiment, Animality, and Oppression by Kind” - Sara Brill (Fairfield University)
OCTOBER
- Thursday 24th: "Something in the Atmosphere: Community Gardens and the Project of an Affective Commons" - Lauren Guilmette (Elon University)
- Time: 4:00 pm
- Location: White Hall 205
NOVEMBER
- Thursday 14th: "Partisan Constitutional Politics and Judicial Legitimacy" - Joseph Fishkin (UCLA, Law)
- Time: 4:00 pm
- Location: Atwood 360
FEBRUARY
- Thursday 27th: "Digital Wynter" - Michael Eng (Dept. of Philosophy and Religion at Appalachian State) **RECEPTION FOLLOWS**
- Time: 4:00 pm
- Location: Atwood 360
APRIL
- Thursday 10th: Michele Moody-Adams (Columbia University)
Other Events
October 29, 2025
Candid Conversations with George Yancy and guest speakers Cornel West (Union Theological Seminary) & Judith Butler (University of California, Berkeley)
- Time: 5:00 pm
- Location: Harland Cinema, Alumni Memorial Unversity Center (AMUC)
September 22, 2025
- 4:00 pm
- Location: Center for Ethics
"These Survivals: Autobiography of an Extinction"
Book Launch with Prof. Lynne Huffer
To celebrate the publication of Prof. Huffer's new book she will be joined in discussion by Prof. Lisa Lee (Art History).
November 22, 2024
"In My Own Time: Black Poets on Paradox and History"
To celebrate the publication of E. Hughes’ poetry collection ANKLE-DEEP IN PACIFIC WATER, thePhilosophy Department is pleased to host the poets Bettina Judd, Opal J. Moore, W.J. Lofton, E. Hughes,and Maya Marshall for a reading and discussion of collective memory and historical dispossession.
2023-24
OCTOBER 5
White Hall 112 - 4:00 pm
Vincent Lloyd (Villanova University)
NOVEMBER 9
Atwood Chemistry 240 - 4:00 pm
David Morris (Concordia University)
"The Life and Times of Phenomenology: Radical Reflection, through the Transcendental, to the Life-World, the Quasi-transcendental, and the Hyper-transcendental"
MARCH 7
Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern University)
"Misknowing and Flat Stories"
William F. Edwards Lecture
"Feeling Myself: Self-Awareness and Objectification" by Ellie Anderson of Pomona College will take place March 21, 2024 at 4:00 pm in White Hall 206 on Emory's campus.
It's no secret that we live in a society that encourages self-obsession. We're encouraged to train our selfie cameras on our faces, fiddle with cover letters to give off the most flattering impression of ourselves, and self-optimize by tracking our daily steps. I argue not that the problem with all this is that it's encouraging us to focus on ourselves too much; instead, the problem is that it's substituting complex, challenging, and responsible forms of relating to ourselves with ones that reduce us to images or things. I argue that emphasizing bodily and felt forms of self-awareness is an important step toward overcoming self-obsession in favor of self-cultivation, drawing on existential phenomenology and feminist theory.
APRIL 18
Atwood Chemistry 316 - 4:00 pm
Valerie Tiberius (University of Minnesota)
"Happy Immoralists and Perspectives on the Prudential Good"
Can a morally bad person live well? This is an ancient question that still divides people. I offer a diagnosis of the long-standing debate between those who answer “no” (moralists about well-being) and those who answer “yes” (subjectivists about well-being). I suggest that the reason people are divided about this question is that the opposing answers represent two different perspectives on well-being that answer to two different sets of practical interests. Given this diagnosis, the cure is to acknowledge the importance of both perspectives. I argue for a way of doing this that preserves an important subjective sense of well-being.
A celebration of Prof. Cindy Willett’s book Uproarious: How Feminist Comics and Other Subversives Speak Truth will include a discussion on the book, humor, ridicule, and politics with guest speakers Dr. Luvell Anderson from Syracuse University and our own Prof. Marta Jimenez. The event will take place on Thursday, January 19 from 4:00-6:30pm in 112 Whitehall.
From the University of Minnesota Press:
Placing theorists in conversation with comedians, Uproarious offers a full-frontal approach to the very foundation of comedy and its profound political impact. Here Cynthia Willett and Julie Willett address the four major theories of humor—superiority, relief, incongruity, and social play—through the lens of feminist and game-changing comics Wanda Sykes, Margaret Cho, Hannah Gadsby, Hari Kondabolu, and Tig Notaro.
2023 Colloquia Series - Cindy Willett flyer
William F. Edwards Lecture
"What is 'Disability' For?" by Joel Michael Reynoldsof the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University will take place October 27, 2022 at 4:15pm in Convocation Hall on Emory's campus.
Disability is an everyday concept, and everyone thinks they have a grasp on what it means. But clearly defining "disability" proves exceptionally difficult. Some claim it's impossible, for the concept simply isn't coherent. What if instead of asking how to define the concept of disability, we ask what it is for? I explore a pragmatic theory of disability and argue that such an approach is better suited for the ends of not just disabled people, but everyone from medical professionals to activists to human rights lawyers.
2022 Edwards Lecture flyer - "What is Disability for?"
Emory University Symposium for Psychoanalysis and Politics
SPAP will take place October 20-22, 2022 at the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute, though you may also attend via Zoom by emailing emorySPAP@gmail.com for the Zoom link. SPAP is bringing together a range of scholars to discuss the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics. Over the course of three days, the Symposium’s participants will deliver and discuss presentations on a variety of thinkers, such as Lacan, Marx, Fanon, Althusser, Freud, Jung, Hegel, Kant, Irigaray, Anzaldùa, and
many others.