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Fall 2016 PAL courses

 Shakespeare, Tragedy, Ethics English 890S-05 Professor Sarah Beckwith Course description: A first aim of this class will be to explore Shakespearean tragedy as a “lethal attempt to deny the existence of another as essential to one’s own.” So tragedy in Shakespeare’s handling turns out to explore acknowledgment as the home of our knowledge of others and…

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Writing and Academic Work 2016-17

 An Investigation of what Academics can Learn from Literary Non-fiction, particularly the Essay and the Memoir A Call for Participation for 2016-2017 Sarah Beckwith and Toril Moi The English Department has generously sponsored a working group on “Writing and Academic Work” for 2016/17. We are writing to invite anyone interested in the topic to participate in the year’s work. If you are interested, please attend our planning meeting on SEPTEMBER 6th at 5.30pm in 314, Allen Building. The project builds on several related convictions. Good writing is good thinking. As such it is integral to intellectual work, not a stylistic layer added on to pre-existing thought. Moreover, writing is a…

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On the Scalability of Cooperative Structures

 Joseph Heath Professor of Philosophy – University of Toronto FRIDAY 01 April Pink Parlor East Duke Building Lecture:11:30 am Reception:1:00 pm Every system of cooperation is sustained by a particular “institutional toolkit” – devices used to promote cooperative behavior and to discourage defection. A particular toolkit is scalable to the extent that it can incorporate an increase in the number of individuals participating, while maintaining roughly constant levels of cooperative behavior. My central contention in this paper will be that our evolved psychology provides us with a set of pro-social psychological dispositions that can be used rather effortlessly to establish small-scale systems of cooperation, but that the fundamental architecture of…

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PAL Welcomes Ingrid Galtung

 PAL Welcomes Ingrid Galtung, our new visiting PAL scholar, who arrives on April 1 Ingrid Galtung is a PhD Research Fellow in comparative literature at the University of Agder in Norway. Her educational background includes an MA in English language literature and a BA in Scandinavian literature from the University of Bergen, Norway. Ingrid works within the field of Modernist studies, taking a special interest in literary evocations of the human body.  Her project examines the relationship between literary aesthetics and early 20th century body cultures in works by Gertrude Stein, H.D., Mina Loy, and Jean Rhys. While at Duke, she plans to complete the introductory chapter of her thesis, tentatively titled…

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Cavell and Modernism

  A symposium R.M. Berry and Paul Grimstad Wednesday Mar 30 5pm  4:30 reception Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall (FHI Garage) C105, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse, First Floor   “Stanley Cavell’s Modernism” R.M. Berry In Stanley Cavell’s interpretation, modernism represents the solution to a problem pervasive in modernity but experienced concretely in theater.  In this paper, I…

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State, Commune, Community

 Bruno Bosteels Professor of Romance Studies Cornell University THURSDAY 03 MARCH Lecture: 2:30 pm Reception: 4:00 pm Workshop: 4:30 pm Pink Parlor East Duke Building PAL-FHI INTERDISCIPLINARY FACULTY SEMINAR ON COOPERATION – 2016 Abstract: If there is one dominant problematic that has emerged out of these past decades of struggle in Latin America, it is…

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