Join us for a conversation between LEAH FELDMAN (University of Chicago), DONALD E. PEASE (Dartmouth College), PAUL BOVÉ (University of Pittsburgh) and AAMIR MUFTI (JHU English), leading humanities scholars who have thought deeply about the multifaceted “returns” of the political Right in different regions of the world.

At the threshold of perhaps the most consequential presidential election in decades, this seminar seeks to consider the rise of Trump and the MAGA contingent in a global critical frame. We will consider some of the ways in which the everyday violence of neoliberal capitalism has been absorbed by our own institutions—for instance, in the corporatized remaking of an entrepreneurial humanities—to highlight the need to revive criticism and insist upon the possibilities of understanding the human through poetry, literature, and the arts. By drawing our collective attention to the globalization of a New Right political culture, this panel seeks to call us to a skeptical and worldly criticism and pedagogy against some of the most powerful tendencies in the profession as well as the wider world.

We’re pleased to offer this event twice, once on JHU’s Homewood campus and once at the Bloomberg Center in DC. Here are the details:

JHU Homewood: Thursday, October 10th, 5pm-7pm, at Scott-Bates Commons, Salon B. Use the entrance at 8 E. 33rd St, Baltimore, MD.

JHU Bloomberg: Friday, October 11th, 5:30-7:30pm, at Bloomberg Center 822, 555 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC.

Reception to follow; free and open to the public. Please RSVP at this link. 

Participants:

Leah Feldman is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. She is the author of On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus (Cornell UP, 2018) and has published in boundary2,  Comparative Literature, Slavic Review, and TDR. She is currently working on a new monograph, Feeling Collapse, which explores waning attachments to internationalist feelings amid the collapse of the Soviet empire.

Paul Bové is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh. His most recent book, Love’s Shadow, was published by Harvard University Press in 2022. He edited the Duke University Press journal, boundary 2, from 1988 to 2023.

Donald E. Pease is the Geisel Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College. Pease is the author or editor of several books and essays on American cultural politics. His most recent essay on Donald Trump, “Pre-emptive Impunity: The Constituent Power of Trump’s make America Great Again Movement,” was published by boundary 2 in 2023.

Aamir R. Mufti is the Ralph S. and Becky G. O’Connor Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Mufti is a scholar of the history and legacies of the British Empire in South Asia and of the crises contained within the so-called Jewish Question in Europe since the eighteenth century. How the figure of migrant impacts the project of European unification is one of his main preoccupations at the moment, in a book project called Strangers in Europa.