Tri-University Dissertation Workshop
The dissertation workshop is a joint initiative by the Critical Theory Cluster at Northwestern, the Goethe University, Frankfurt, and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris to create a forum in which original research engaging with the tradition of Critical Theory is presented and discussed. The annual three-day event rotates between Evanston, Frankfurt, and Paris and offers graduate students and faculty the opportunity to come together and discuss their current research.
Developed from a long-standing collaboration among the three universities, the workshop provides an intense cooperative environment for graduate students to develop and publicize their dissertation projects in conjunction with faculty lectures that highlight new and emerging areas of interdisciplinary scholarship in critical theory.
Among the speakers at the 2017 workshop are Penelope Deutscher (Philosophy, Northwestern) and Thomas Lemke (Goethe-University, Frankfurt).
Dissertation projects include papers on the Judeo-Christian concept of ”anointing” in the context of olfactory practices and poetics; a dissertation on the spectacle of the human body in eighteenth-century experimental natural philosophy and literature; a dissertation that explores the notion of the “underground” in nineteenth-century German and French literature; a dissertation oriented toward a human-animal ethics from visual and literary representations of hunting; a dissertation on the structure of global governance from Kant's idea of perpetual peace to contemporary planetary challenges; and a dissertation on the concept of utility in Aristotle, Spinoza and Marx.
The 2017 workshop in Frankfurt is organized with financial support from a TGS Mellon Cluster Catalyst grant.