News & Events

Screenshot of Writing is Thinking website

February 15, 2021

Heather Wallace starts “Writing Is Thinking” Editing Service

PAL’s former Associate Director, Heather Wallace, who defended her Ph.D. dissertation on Simone de Beauvoir last year, has started an editing service called “Writing Is Thinking.” Inspired by the work we have done at PAL on writing over the years, and also inspired by Verlyn Klinkenborg’s brilliant Several Short Sentences About Writing, Heather now offers…

February 1, 2021

WRITING IS THINKING — A WORKSHOP WITH CARYL PHILLIPS

PAL is pleased to announce that Caryl Phillips is returning this spring as the English Department’s Blackburn Author-in-Residence. You are invited to join Prof. Phillips’s virtual Essay Writing Workshop, Monday, February 15, 3-5pm. The workshop is limited to 10 students, all who will respond to the prompt in relation to the photographs downloadable from Dropbox here. Responses should be submitted…

Featured January 29, 2021

Stanley Cavell: Constellations of the Ordinary

Please note this fantastic colloquium on Stanley Cavell and the Ordinary, organized from Lima, Peru. Longtime PAL followers will recognize half the speakers, for they have all visited us at Duke. I believe that most of the talks will be distributed in advance. But to follow the talks and get the full schedule, you need…

Featured January 29, 2021

PAL Certificate talk – Kathleen Maxymuk

Thursday, February 11, 202110:00 a.m. Please join us at 10 am on February 11 for a talk by Kathleen Maxymuk, PhD candidate in Romance Studies! The talk, given as part of the requirements for the Certificate in Philosophy, Arts, and Literature, is titled ‘The Paradoxes of the “Politique des Auteurs”: Reading Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series…

September 1, 2020

3rd Annual Stanford-Duke Phil & Lit Conference – Coming Up

In & Out of Context September 25 & 26, 2020Caroline Levine, Cornell University & Jan Zwicky, University of Victoria This year’s conference topic, “In & Out of Context” brings together doctoral students and scholars that work at the intersection of philosophy and literature, the arts, and media studies to reflect on how their disciplines rely…

Flyer for Wittegenstein Workshop: Reading Philosophical Investigations

February 17, 2020

Wittgenstein Workshop: Reading Philosophical Investigations

February, 29, 2020 9am – 1pm Allen 314 This workshop is intended for beginners as well as for seasoned Wittgenstein readers. Three philosophers and a literary critic will each read and comment on a brief passage from Philosophical investigations which has been important to their own work. The passages will be available at the workshop.…

Flyer for Deborah Nelson guest of PAL Intellectual Women's Series

February 10, 2020

PAL’s Intellectual Women Series: “Tenderness and Terror”

On February 20th at 5pm, PAL will host Deborah Nelson. Professor Nelson is chair of the University of Chicago’s English department, and she is the author of Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil. Her book won the MLA’s prestigious James Russell Lowell prize in 2017. Her talk is entitled “Tenderness and Terror” and…

January 22, 2020

Thinking Publicly | What is the good of public intellectual writing?

Jon Baskin – Founding Editor of The Point, Associate Director of the MA Program in Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism a the New School, New York, and author of Ordinary Unhappiness: The Therapeutic Fiction of David Foster Wallace (Stanford UP, 2019). When we founded the The in 2008, we assumed that the chief obstacles to getting good essays from academics would have to do with prose style. In fact the most serious challenges we faced were both more interesting and more intractable. They had to do not with how academics could write for a public audience, but with why they wanted to. In this talk, I’ll discuss the two pictures…