Calendar

Each week, a legal theorist or moral or political philosopher presents a paper to the group, which consists of students, faculty from the Law School and other departments of NYU, and faculty from other universities. Each week’s paper is posted at least a week in advance on this page; participants are expected to have read the paper in advance.

The public sessions of the colloquium take place on Thursdays, in Lester Pollock Colloquium Room, Furman Hall, 9th floor,  from 4:00 to 7:00 pm.

Students taking the course for credit:

Students enrolled in the Colloquium meet separately with the conveners for an additional two-hour seminar on Wednesdays. One hour is devoted to a review of the preceding Thursday’s colloquium discussion, and one hour to preparation for the colloquium the following day.

Students are asked to write short reaction papers weekly, and each student is asked to make two or more oral presentations to the seminar during the term. Assessment is based on participation, reaction papers and presentations, and a final term paper.

Admission to the seminar is only by permission of the conveners. Students wishing to take the colloquium for credit should send their applications via e-mail to Omar Andron <owa207@nyu.edu> between July 1 and July 31, stating their background in law and philosophy and their interest in the colloquium. The application should use the subject line: Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy Application for Fall 2024. Please indicate which program you are enrolled in. Students not in the School of Law or Department of Philosophy at NYU should check with Academic Services about eligibility to register.

Colloquium 2024
Professors Liam Murphy and Samuel Scheffler 

August 29th
Cécile Fabre, University of Oxford
The Expressive Duty to Vote

September 5th
David Owens, Kings College London
Rules And Rulers

September 12th
Elizabeth Anderson, University of Michigan

September 19th
Seana Shiffrin, UCLA

September 26th
Sanford Diehl, NYU Philosophy

October 10th
Matthew Liao, NYU Bioethics

October 17th
Sophia Moreau, NYU Law

October 24th
Jed Lewinsohn, University of Pittsburgh

October 31st
R. Jay Wallace, UC Berkeley

November 7th
Anna Stilz, Princeton University
* Note that the colloquium will be held in the Greenberg Lounge (1st floor, Vanderbilt Hall, 40 Washington Square South) for this session.

November 14th
Benjamin Eidelson, Harvard Law School

November 21st
Derrick Darby, Rutgers University

Paternal, patriarchal, and fraternal concepts, metaphors, and images have long dominated thinking about politics. But the political, Gil Anidjar argues, has always been maternal.

In a series of finely woven meditations on slavery, sovereignty, and the social contract, this book places mothers and mothering at the crux of political thought. Anidjar identifies a maternal sovereignty and a maternal contract, showing that without motherhood, there could be no constitution, preservation, or reproduction of collective existence in time. And maternal power is also power over life and death, as he reveals through a nuanced consideration of abortion.

Through the concept of the maternal, Anidjar offers new insights into abiding sources from the Bible and ancient Greece to classical and modern political philosophy—the story of Hagar and Sarah, Oedipus and his two mothers, Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave—reinterpreted in light of Black and feminist criticism, psychoanalytic theory, and autotheoretical reflection. Elegantly written and provocative, On the Sovereignty of Mothers offers the maternal as a new frame for understanding the political order.

About the Author

Gil Anidjar teaches in the Department of Religion, where his interest in religion and politics, and more specifically in political theology and political philosophy, have guided courses such “God,” “Vampires” and “Mothers” for a number of years now. He is the author, among other books, of The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Columbia University Press 2003) and Blood: A Critique of Christianity (Columbia University Press 2014). He has also edited Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Religion. Recent essays include “The Destruction of Thought,” “That Great Mother of Danger,” “The Rights of White (In Search of a Majority),” “D—nce,” and “Learning Waters.”

About the Speakers

Amaryah Armstrong is an assistant professor of race in American religion and culture at Virginia Tech. Her research cuts across the fields of Black Studies, American Studies, Political Theology, and Continental Philosophy of Religion to explore the relationship between religion and the reproduction of race in the aftermath of 1492. She is working on two projects: Reproducing Peoplehood: On the Afterlife of Christian Orde and A Measure of Existence: On the Value of Black Theology. She also has several articles in the works on the insights of various black intellectuals (W.E.B. Du Bois, Hortense Spillers) and the relationship between black culture and political theology.

Beth A. Berkowitz is Ingeborg Rennert Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College. She is the author of Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2006; winner of the Salo Baron prize for First Book in Jewish Studies); Defining Jewish Difference: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She is co-editor of Religious Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation (Routledge, 2017) and a contributor to it.

Matthew Engelke is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion and a member of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. From 2018-2024, he also served as Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life. Trained as an anthropologist, Professor Engelke’s main research interests are on Christianity, secular humanism, media theory, materiality, and semiotics. He has conducted fieldwork in Zimbabwe and in Britain. He is currently working on a book about secularity and death, based on research among humanist funeral celebrants in London.

Zehra Mehdi is a PhD candidate in South Asian Religions, working at the intersections of religion, political violence, and psychoanalysis. Her dissertation is a thick psychoanalytic ethnographic account of how Muslims as religious minorities in India facing state oppression use religion to express themselves both emotionally and politically. Focusing on the lives of Muslims in north India, her research studies how persecuted religious minorities draw upon religion as a psychic reserve to articulate their trauma, mourn their losses, and forge political resistance against the state. Her dissertation is titled, “The ‘work of Religion’: Trauma, Mourning and Political Resistance in the lives of Muslims in ‘Old Lucknow.’”