Current Speakers: 2011-2012

Anthony Bogues is currently the Harmon Family Professor, Professor of Africana Studies, affiliated Professor of Political Science and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, and a Visiting Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is also an Honorary Professor at the Center for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa and Visiting Professor of the Humanities at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. His books are: Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political Thought of CLR James (1997); Black Heretics and Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals
(2003); and Empire of Liberty: Power, Freedom and Desire (2010). He is the editor of two volumes of Caribbean intellectual history, After Man The Human: Critical Essays on the Thought of Sylvia Wynter (2006); and The George Lamming Reader: The Aesthetics of Decolonization (2011). He has published over 60 essays in the fields of intellectual history, political theory, and cultural and literary history and is an associate editor of the journal Small Axe and member of the editorial collective of the journal Boundary 2. He recently co-curated a national exhibition on Haitian Art, titled, Reframing Haiti –Art, History and Performativity. He is currently working on three major projects: a political & philosophical project on questions of the human, freedom, human emancipation and the black intellectual tradition; co-curating a major exhibition on Haitian art for 2014 in Paris and Cape Town, South Africa; and an intellectual & political biography of Michael Manley and Jamaican postcolonial politics.

Svetlana Boym is a Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Harvard University and the Associate of Harvard School of Design and Architecture. Writer, theorist and media artist, she is the author of many books including The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Architecture of the Off-Modern (2008), Territories of Terror: Memory and Mythology of Gulag (exhibit and catalogue 2006), and the novel Ninochka (2003). Her newest book Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea (Chicago University Press, 2010) spans from Greek tragedy to contemporary art scandals, and explores cross-cultural conceptions of freedom and the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

She delivered lectures and performances in Vienna Kunsthalle, Freud’s Museum, Centre Pompidou, Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Madrid, Royal Theater in Copenhagen as well as in major American universities (including Gauss Seminar on Criticism in Princeton University).

Her s on-going media art projects “Nostalgic Technologies” and “Phantasmagorias”and “Phantom Limbs” were presented during the City of Women Festival in Ljubljana, Slovenia and in the Theater of Piazza Santa Margherita in Venice, the Center for Book Arts in New York City, in the Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Madrid, BKS Garage of the Royal Academy of Arts in Copenhagen and Parsons the New School for Design, NYC.
Most recently Boym took part in Venice Architectural Biennial in 2010 and is now working on the Off Modern exhibit at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest for 2013.
Svetlana Boym is a recipient of Guggenheim Fellowship and a winner of Mendelsohn Prize for Mentoring and Teaching (nominated by her graduate students).

Native of St. Petersburg, Russia, she now lives and works in Cambridge, USA and on svetlanaboym.com

Alastair Macaulay came to the United States from London, England as chief dance critic of The New York Times in 2007. Since then he has reviewed dance in more than twenty states of the Union, most notably in his 2010 "Nutcracker Marathon," when he saw twenty-eight different productions of "The Nutcracker" between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve, between Seattle and Houston, Las Vegas and a mansion in Newport, Rhode Island.

Prior to this he served as chief theatre critic to The Financial Times in the years 1994-2007, as chief dance critic to the Times Literary Supplement in 1996-2007, as guest dance critic to The New Yorker in 1988 ad 1992, as chief examiner in dance history to the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing in 1987-2002, and as founding editor of the British dance quarterly Dance Theatre Journal in 1983-88. Between 1980 and 2002 he taught dance history at B.A., M.A., and other levels in Britain at various British colleges including the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance (where his students included the choreographer Matthew Bourne), University of London Goldsmiths College, University of Surrey, the Royal Academy of Dancing, and the London Studio Centre. He frequently spoke about dance and theatre on BBC radio and television, and often lectured on dance at the Royal Opera House, Barbican Centre, and other places.

His short biography Margo Fonteyn was published in 1998 by Sutton Books, UK. His extensive book of interviews with the choreographer Matthew Bourne was published by Faber & Faber, UK in 2000; a second edition, Matthew Bourne and his New Adventures, will be published soon. He is preparing a book on the choreographer Merce Cunningham for Farrar Straus Giroux, NY.

Helen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard, where she received her Ph.D. in English and American literature, after completing an undergraduate degree in chemistry at Emmanuel College. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has written books on Yeats, Herbert, Keats, Stevens, Shakespeare, Seamus Heaney, and Emily Dickinson. Her most recent books are Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries; Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill; and Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form. She holds twenty-five honorary doctorate degrees and is a frequent reviewer of contemporary poetry in such journals as The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Republic. Her avocational interests include music, painting, and medicine.

Helen Whitney is an award-winning filmmaker with over thirty years of experience producing dramatic features and documentary films. Her subjects have stretched across a broad spectrum of topics including youth gangs; a portrait of the 1996 Presidential candidates; a Trappist monastery in Massachusetts; the McCarthy Era; Pope John Paul II; and photographer Richard Avedon.