Title: Reading Human Selves in A Posthuman World
Keynote speaker: Samuel Diener ( Harvard University’s doctor, adjunct professor at Emmanuel College)
Time：at 6：30p.m. on Sep.24th
ZOOM：2573998249 (password：D##U55)
Organizer：School of Foreign Studies
Speaker’s introduction：Samuel Diener is a PhD Candidate in English and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University, and an adjunct professor of English at Emmanuel College. His scholarship focuses on the ways that people in Europe and the Americas articulated identity through quotidian material practices of reading and commodity consumption over the long early period of European colonial expansion, from 1500-1800. His work has appeared in articles in Eighteenth Century Fiction and Women Writers in Context, and he writes about new materialist theory and scholarship across the disciplines for The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory and in reviews for other journals.
Introduction to the lecture：Since the turn of the 21st century, “New Materialist” theory has been an ascendant theoretical frame for scholarship across the humanities. Humanist scholars have turned their attention away from human selves to the world they inhabit, showing that their agency is distributed, their knowledge situated, and their boundaries porous to the touch of nonhuman things.
Yet the field faces a fundamental problem. Confronted by the crises of climate catastrophe, humans need more than ever to be able to imagine a better world. What is the ontological status of such an imagination? And how can a new materialist philosophy account for human creatures’ ethical engagement with themselves and with their world?
Increasingly, new materialist scholars have turned to literary and visual texts in search of answers to these questions and, with an eye to the insights of origins, to historical texts. This talk will examine this turn, and offer notes toward a new materialist theory of the human, fierce but fragile still.
