The New York Area Group in European Intellectual and Cultural History
This working group, active since 2001, meets monthly during the academic year.
Please e-mail Jerrold Seigel for copies of papers listed below.
Unless otherwise noted, meetings take place at the CUNY Graduate Center, 5th Ave and 34th St., at 5:30 p.m.
Other venues for work in intellectual history in the New York area include the University Seminar on Early Modern France.
Spring 2016
April 21
Edward Baring (Drew),
"An Augustinian International: The rise of Christian Existentialism"
March 24
Debora Silverman (UCLA),
"Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness"
February 24
Camille Robcis (Cornell),
"François Tosquelles, Saint-Alban, and the Invention of Institutional Psychotherapy"
Fall 2015
December 3
Dick Howard (SUNY at Stony Brook),
"Citizen Habermas"
November 19
Isser Woloch (Columbia),
"Toward the Postwar Moment: A Tale of Three Progressive Visions"
October 29
Scott Johnson (CUNY Graduate Center),
"Sartre and Algeria through the French Revolution"
September 17
Jeffrey Barash (University of Amiens),
"The Reality of the Historical Past: The Heideggerian Turn in Paul Ricoeur's Historical Reflection"
Spring 2015
May 7
Sophia Rosenfeld (Yale),
"Voting and the Invention of Political Choice"
April 9
Georgiana Perlea (Columbia),
"Quarante-huitards du XXe siècle. The dissident Marxism of Socialisme ou Barbarie, Arguments, and Le contrat social, 1953-1968"
March 18
Jeffrey Freedman (Yeshiva),
"Wounded Imagination: Fears of Imprisonment in Enlightenment France"
Fall 2014
November 20
Steven K. Vincent (NC State University),
"The Socialist Liberalism of Élie Halévy"
October 23
Alon Segev (Fordham),
"Escaping the Enlightenment: Liberalism in the Remaking of the eighteenth-century Past, 1800-1850"
October 2
Dan Edelstein (Stanford),
"Revolution in Permanence and the Fall of Popular Sovereignty"
Spring 2014
April 10
Julian Bourg (Boston College),
"The Incidence of la terreur during the French Revolution"
March 20
Alan Kahan (Florida International University),
"Checks and Balances for Democratic Souls: Religion and Freedom in Democratic Societies"
January 6
Holly Case (Cornell),
"On the Origin and Significance of Questions"
Fall 2013
December 12
Alexander Bevilacqua (Princeton),
"Understanding Islam in the Early Enlightenment"
October 24
Franz Leander Fillafer (Konstanz),
"Escaping the Enlightenment: Liberalism in the Remaking of the eighteenth-century Past, 1800-1850"
September 12
Anthony Grafton (Princeton),
"Spinoza's Hermeneutics: Some Heretical Thoughts"
Spring 2013
March 7
Malachi Ha-Cohen (Duke),
"Typology and the Holocaust: Erich Auerbach and Judeo-Christian Europe"
April 11
David Sorkin (CUNY Graduate Center),
from The Religious Enlightenment
May 1
Charly Coleman (Columbia University)
Fall 2012
September 20
Federico Finchelstein (New School),
"Fascist Genealogies of Peronism"
November 15
Michael Scott Christofferson (Adelphia University),
"Paris, Cholet, Saint-Amand-Montrond: François Furet's Youth"
November 29
Joanna Stalnaker (Columbia University)
"Buffon on Death and Fossils"
Spring 2012
January 26
Knox Peden (University of Queensland),
"The Strange Spinozism of Gilles Deleuze"
March 22
Matthias Bormuth (University of Oldenburg and Columbia),
"Karl Löwith as a Critic of Martin Heidegger"
April 5
Janek Wasserman (University of Alabama),
"Österreichische Aktion: Monarchism and the Unity of the Austrian Conservative Ideological Field during the First Republic"
Fall 2011
September 15
Benjamin Wurgaft (New School),
"Leo Strauss and the Problem of the Intellectual"
October 20
John Torpey (CUNY),
“Inventing the Axial Age: The Origins and Uses of an Historical Concept”
December 8
Karuna Mantena (Yale),
"Another Realism: the Politics of Gandhian Nonviolence"
Spring 2011
February 10
Matthew Specter (Central Connecticut State),
"Jürgen Habermas: An Intellectual Biography"
March 31
Andrew Sartori (NYU)
"Genealogy, Theory, History"
April 14
James Chappel (Columbia University)
"European Catholic Thought and the Making of Postwar Europe"
Fall 2010
September 16
J.B. Schneewind (Johns Hopkins),
"Autonomy after Kant"
October 7
Bernard Flynn (New School),
"Political Theology and Its Vicissitudes"
December 2
Gary Wilder (Graduate Center)
Spring 2010
January 28
Edward Baring (Princeton),
"Reading Lévi-Strauss at the ENS; or, How to be a Good Structuralist"
February 18
Giuseppe Blanco (Jan Van Eyck Akademie--Maastricht),
"Georges Canguilhem: From Passions to Norms"
March 11
Christina Gerhardt (independent),
"From the Social Movements to Armed Struggle: The Historical Context of the Red Army Faction"
April 22
Camille Robcis (Cornell),
"Kinship and the Structuralist Social Contract"
Fall 2009
September 10
Pierre Force (Columbia University),
"Voltaire and the Necessity of Modern History"
October 15
Stefanos Geroulanos (New York University),
"Alexandre Kojeve's Negative Anthropology, 1931-39,"
November 19
Warren Breckman (Penn),
“Of Empty Places: Zizek and Laclau, or the End of the Affair.”
Spring 2009
February 19
Emily Levine (Yale University),
"Cassirer, Hamburg, and German Liberalism"
March 26
John Abromeit (Buffalo State University),
"Divergence, Estrangement, and Gradual Rapprochement: Adorno and Horkheimer in the 1930s"
April 30
Aurelian Craiutu (Indiana University),
"Moderation and the Group of Coppet"
Fall 2008
September 11
Charity Scribner (MIT/LaGuardia),
"Politics and Terror: The RAF and the German Autumn Revisited"
October 16
A. Dirk Moses (University of Sydney),
"Arendt on Imperialism and Genocide: A Reconsideration"
November 20
Michael Saler (University of California-Davis),
"Geographies of the Imagination: Literary Prehistories of Virtual Reality"
Fall 2007
October 11
Jonathan Israel (Institute for Advanced Study),
"Radical Enlightenment and the Turn to Representative Democracy (1750-1789)"
November 8
Siep Stuurman (Erasmus University, Rotterdam),
“Beyond ‘Modern Equality': Can We Write a World History of Cross-Cultural Equality"
December 11
Philippe Raynaud (University of Paris II and EHESS),
"The French Far Left since the 1960s"
Spring 2008
January 24 (12:30 pm)
Lynn Hunt (UCLA),
"The Problem of Modernity"
March 13
Ethan Kleinberg (Wesleyan University),
"Haunting History: Deconstruction and the Spirit of Revision"
April 17
Olivier Remaud (EHESS, Paris),
"Is Memory a Private Affair?"
Image credits: Metropolitan Museum of Art & Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago