The European Studies Group will present a virtual guest lecture by Professor Esther Peeren of the University of Amsterdam in a talk entitled "Suspicious Minds: Symptomatic Reading in Latour, Derrida, and Wynter" from 1:00-2:00 p.m. on Monday, April 4.  

This event is free and open to the public.

Against the background of the recent postcritical backlash against close and especially symptomatic reading in literary studies, Peeren will argue for the need to remain suspicious of what seems self-evident (who “we” are, who “man” is, what form “the world” has, what a war is, and how it is to be declared and waged), as well as to remain alert to ghosts and monsters – to what may not be apparent at first glance and what, symptomatically, points beyond itself.

Esther Peeren is professor of cultural analysis at the University Amsterdam and academic director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She directs the ERC-funded research project “Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World” (2018-2023). Recent publications include The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Palgrave, 2014) and the edited volumes Peripheral Visions in the Globalizing Present (Brill, 2016, with Hanneke Stuit and Astrid Van Weyenberg), Global Cultures of Contestation (Palgrave, 2018, with Robin Celikates, Jeroen de Kloet and Thomas Poell) and Other Globes: Past and Peripheral Imaginations of Globalization (Palgrave, 2019, with Simon Ferdinand and Irene Villaescusa-Illán).