The limits of “data” as the unit of humanistic study will be the topic of this year’s Culler Lecture in Critical Theory at the Society for the Humanities. Entitled “On Behalf of the Anexact: Along the Lines of Franz Kafka, Paul Klee, Len Lye,” the lecture will be delivered by Jane Bennett, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. The talk will take place in the A.D. White House Guerlac Room at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, March 19, and will be followed by a reception. This event is free and open to the public, and no registration is required.
Bennett is a founding scholar of the field of new materialism, with expertise in environmental political philosophy, American Romanticism, political affect and contemporary social thought. Her talk will address the role of the humanities in relation to the rise of “data science” as the signature focus of the twenty-first century American research university. She considers some literary and artistic efforts to conceptualize what she calls the “anexact”: subtle phenomena in democratic life that refuse to conform to the rigid boundaries and additive logic of data.
The Society for the Humanities hosts the Culler Lecture in Critical Theory annually, as a form of acknowledging the Society’s ongoing legacy of promoting the value of critical theory.
“We couldn’t imagine a more fitting scholar to deliver the Culler Lecture this year,” said Alexander Livingston, associate director of the Society for the Humanities and associate professor in the Department of Government (A&S). “Jane Bennett has fundamentally transformed the ways scholars understand the complicated entanglement of the human and the nonhuman worlds. Her path-breaking work on environmental political thought and ‘the political lives of things’ has defined the state of the field across the humanities for over a decade.”
Bennett holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her books include “Influx & Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman” (Duke University Press, 2020); “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things” (Duke University Press, 2010); “The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics” (Princeton University Press, 2001), “Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and The Wild” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), and “Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment: Nature and the State in a Post-Hegelian Era” (NYU Press, 1987). She is co-editor of several book collections.
Bennett will also offer a lunchtime workshop for humanities graduate students on Thursday, March 20, from 12-2 p.m., entitled "Comparative Thinking." The workshop, said Bennett, will focus “specifically on the practice of trans-cultural ‘comparative conceptualization’ within humanities scholarship.”
To register for the workshop, interested graduate students should email Chloe Wray (clw252@cornell.edu) by Monday, March 17. Readings will be circulated in advance, and lunch will be provided.
