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Keynote Speakers

Andrew Benjamin (Monash University)
Adriana Cavarero (Università di Verona)
Ian James (University of Cambridge)
Griselda Pollock (University of Leeds)
Samuel Weber (Northwestern University)

Andrew Benjamin is Professor of Critical Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, Melbourne. His most recent publications are Of Jews and Animals (Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Place, Commonality and Judgment: Continental Philosophy and the Ancient Greeks (Continuum, 2010); Style and Time: Essays on the Politics of Appearance (Northwestern University Press, 2006).

Adriana Cavarero is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Verona, Italy, and she has been Visiting Professor at New York University, Berkeley and Harvard. Among her books: In Spite of Plato (New York: Routledge 1995), Relating Narratives (New York: Routledge 2000), Stately Bodies (Michigan University Press 2001), For One than One Voice (Stanford University Press 2005) and Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence ( Columbia University Press 2009).

Ian James specialises in twentieth-century and contemporary French literature and philosophy. He is the author of Pierre Klossowski: The Persistence of a Name (Oxford Legenda, 2000), The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford University Press, 2006) and Paul Virilio (Routledge, 2007). He is also co-editor of Whispers of the Flesh: Essays in Memory of Pierre Klossowski (Diacritics, Spring 2005) and Exposures: Critical Essays on Jean-Luc Nancy (Oxford Literary Review, vol. 27, 2005). He is currently working on a project which examines the way in which the question of technology has been taken up in recent French philosophy.

Samuel Weber is Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at Northwestern and co-director of its Paris Program in critical Theory. Weber studied with Paul de Man and Theodor W. Adorno, whose book, Prisms, he co-translated into English. Professor Weber has also published books on Balzac, Lacan, and Freud as well as on the relation of institutions and media to interpretation. In the 1980s he worked in Germany as a ‘dramaturge’ in theatre and opera productions. Out of the confrontation of that experience with his work in critical theory came the book, Theatricality as Medium (Fordham University Press, 2004). He also published Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking (Fordham University Press, 2005) and Benjamin's –abilities (Harvard University Press, 2008).