Events

We have an exciting calendar of events for the 2024-2025 academic year, including the Doctoral Fellow Lecture Series and the NFC Annual Lecture. If you want to explore the catalog of past NFC talks, please visit our YouTube Channel linked here, follow us on Instagram (@northropfryecentre), or visit this web-page for all upcoming and past events. 

About the talk...

Famous chefs, Michelin stars, culinary techniques and gastronomical accolades attract moneyed tourists to Spain from all over the world. Even with this global attention, we know little about how Spanish cooking became a litmus test for demonstrating Spain's modernity and, relatedly, the roles ascribed to the modern Spanish women responsible for daily cooking.

Ingram will present her new book Women's Work and discuss how efforts to articulate a new, modern Spain infiltrated multiple genres and media, including those about food. Culinary writing engaged debates about women's roles in Spanish society and reached women at the site of much of their daily labor--the kitchen--and shaped thinking about their roles in modernizing Spain.

About the speaker...

Rebecca Ingram is Professor of Spanish Languages, Cultures and Literatures, Honors Faculty Liaison, and the Interim Director of Interdisciplinary Humanities at the University of San Diego. Professor Ingram’s research involves food cultural studies in relation to Spain. She is the author of Women’s Work: How Culinary Cultures Shaped Modern Spain (Vanderbilt, 2022). Her volume Digestible Governance: Gastrocracy and Spanish Foodways, co-edited with Eugenia Afinoguénova and Lara Anderson, will be published later in 2024. In 2020, the Bulletin of Spanish Studies published the special issue she and Anderson edited titled “Transhispanic Food Cultural Studies,” the first extended study of food as a cultural text within the broader fields of Iberian and Latin American Cultural Studies.

Lecture presented in collaboration with Culinaria. Registration via Eventbrite here.

About the talk...

One of the truly astounding things about postmodernism is that, whatever it became in the hands of less talented enthusiasts, it originated as more or less what many of its recent practitioners say it is not, that is, it began as a formal system or a series of formal systems. Formal systems are probably not well-known or understood outside of mathematics, computer and natural sciences, but they are pervasive across social sciences and humanities as well. This paper will examine the two sides of this question. On the one side, what takes place when a society only speaks with propositions that are determined to be either rationally or factually true, and on the other side, what happens when language is fully metaphorical?

About the speaker...

Dorothea Olkwoski is University of Colorado Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at CU Colorado Springs. She is the Director of Cognitive Studies, former Director of Humanities, former Chair of Philosophy, and former founding Director of Women's Studies. Olkowski is the author of more than one hundred articles and fourteen books, including her most recent publication, Deleuze, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty, The Logic and Pragmatics of Affect, Perception, and Creation (Indiana University Press, 2021).

Lecture presented in collaboration with the Centre for Creativity. Registration available via Eventbrite here.

About the talk...

As the world grapples with the promises and threats of AI, at the extreme ends of both wish-fulfillment and nightmare stands a common premise: the machine that not only follows instructions, but also chooses, invents, designs, and controls.

For some commentators, of course, we have already crossed that threshold. For others, we never will. While such disputes may entail different interpretations of today’s technological capacities, they are far more influenced by a lack of consensus concerning what we mean when we talk about human intelligence. And this is a debate that spans millennia.

While a thorough archeology of concepts like mind, spirit, soul—what is implicitly conjured by the promise or specter of thinking machines—would start at least with the ancient Greeks, early modern Europe provides us with a key moment and some vital protagonists in the story. In this lecture, William Egginton delves into a cross-cultural, transmedia conversation—involving thinkers and writers such as Llull, Cervantes, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant—to unearth some of the basic problems and unspoken assumptions of today’s AI catastrophists and apologists alike.

About the speaker...

William Egginton is the Decker Professor in the Humanities, chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of multiple books, including How the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle in History (2007), The Philosopher’s Desire (2007), The Theater of Truth (2010), In Defense of Religious Moderation (2011), The Man Who Invented Fiction (2016), The Splintering of the American Mind (2018), and The Rigor of Angels (2023), which was named to several best of 2023 lists, including The New York Times and The New Yorker. He is co-author with David Castillo of Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (2017) and What Would Cervantes Do? Navigating Post-Truth with Spanish Baroque Literature (2022). His latest book, on the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and surrealist dimensions of the work of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, was published in January 2024.

Registration available via Eventbrite here.