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Visiting Professors in the Humanities

Academic year 2008-09 will see the inauguration of an exciting new program of Visiting Professors in the Humanities. The Cogut Center has selected four faculty members, two for each semester, from other colleges or universities to come to Brown. Each Visiting Professor in the Humanities will offer a Humanities (HMAN) course during their semester in residence, offering advanced undergraduates and graduate students new perspectives and opportunities for scholarly exploration.

Fall Semester

Megan Glick
Prof. Glick’s research encompasses popular culture and visual culture studies; critical race and gender theory; the history of science and medicine; animal studies; and bioethics. In particular, her work focuses on the cultural, intellectual, and scientific history of the “human” in the twentieth century U.S., and argues that the terms of “humanness” and “species difference” have been critical in the determination of other bio-cultural forms of identity and alterity. By considering various sites of liminal corporeality, her research addresses literal and symbolic forms of dehumanization, from the dissolution of the animal / human boundary to modes of socio-political disenfranchisement.

Learn more about Prof. Glick.

Nergis Ertürk
What are the real methodological consequences of the integration of non-European languages into the field of a "new" comparative literature, in a period of intensified self-reflection? Prof. Ertürk's current work argues that any account of the emergence of modern literature in Turkey must include some account of the transformation of writing practices that accompanied its emergence and which mediate it. Prof. Ertürk suggests that the linguistic crisis embodied in modern Turkish alphabet and language reforms provides us with one figure for a comparative literary modernity necessarily shaping comparative critical practice, as much as the production of its literary objects.

Learn more about Prof. Ertürk.

Click here to view Fall HMAN course listings.

Spring Semester

David Kyuman Kim
Prof. Kim's research examines the challenges to the secular culture of modernity and postmodernity posed by emerging forms of religious, social and political solidarity and identity. Through interrogations of social phenomena such as nationalism, the formation and maintenance of racial and ethnic identities, critical engagements with traditions of radical democracy and the role of dance to explore religious motivation and existential crises confronting those who pursue newly-held yet world-altering beliefs, Prof. Kim's work will re-evaluate theories of secularization and modernity and their attendant prescriptions for freedom and action.

Learn more about Prof. Kim.

Denise Riley
Current research work centers on the history of understandings of the inner voice and inner speech, and how they both enter into, and shape, conceptions of what's interior and what's outside. Drawing on material from recent neurology and philosophies of affectivity, Prof. Riley's latest project will encompass aspects from the neurophysiology of inner speech to philosophies of self presence, and the new neurophenomenology of self-awareness while still considering the traditional spectrum from hallucination to revelation and conscience.

Learn more about Prof. Riley.

Click here to view Spring HMAN course listings.