Keynotes

SATURDAY MAY 6th: KEYNOTE DIALOGUE
Moderator: Chuan Chen

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. She received her B.A. from the University of Calcutta and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. She holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Toronto and London. An activist as well as educator, she is involved in international women's movements and issues surrounding ecological agriculture. She has been deeply involved in rural education in Asia for nearly two decades. Professor Spivak has published numerous books including: Of Grammatology (translation with critical introduction of Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie, 1976); Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (1993); Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993); A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999); Death of a Discipline (2003), and Other Asias (2005. Her translations of the Indian writer Mahasweta Devi includes Imaginary Maps (1994); Breast Stories (1997), Old Women (1999); Chotti Munda and His Arrow (a novel, 2002); Her translation from eighteenth century Bengali mystical lyric is entitled Song for Kali: A Cycle (translation with introduction of Ramproshad Sen, 2000). "Righting Wrongs" (2003) and "Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching" (2004); "Translating into English" (2005) are recent articles that reflect Spivak's activism and her concern for human rights.

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. She is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000), Hegemony, Contingency, Universality, with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, (Verso Press, 2000). In 2004, she published a collection of writings on war's impact on language and thought entitled Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning with Verso Press. That same year, The Judith Butler Reader appeared, edited by Sara Salih, with Blackwell Publishers. A collection of her essays on gender and sexuality, Undoing Gender, appeared with Routledge in 2004 as well. Her most recent book, Giving an Account of Oneself, appeared with Fordham University Press (2005) and considers the partial opacity of the subject, and the relation between critique and ethical reflection. She is currently working on essays pertaining to Jewish Philosophy, focusing on pre-Zionist criticisms of state violence. She continues to write on cultural and literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, and sexual politics.

a conference hosted by the graduate students in the Department of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine	May 5&6, 2006
h ome conference schedule keynotes emergent scholarship panel panel descriptions and participant bios abstracts screening: experimental film shorts "global visions: memory-traces, libidinal imaginaries, and intercessory images" maps, directions, and helpful links "global states" poster (pdf) other events and activities many thanks to our CONFERENCE SPONSORS: UCI Department of Comparative Literature, UCI Humanities Center, International Center for Writing and Translation, UCI Critical Theory Emphasis, Critical Theory Institute, UC Humanities Research Institute, Department of Asian American Studies, Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies, Department of French and Italian, Department of German, Department of History, Department of English, Postmodern Culture, the Philosophy Graduate Students, and the Program in Women's Studies	SATURDAY MAY 6th: KEYNOTE DIALOGUE Moderator: Chuan Chen Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. She received her B.A. from the University of Calcutta and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. She holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Toronto and London. An activist as well as educator, she is involved in international women's movements and issues surrounding ecological agriculture. She has been deeply involved in rural education in Asia for nearly two decades. Professor Spivak has published numerous books including: Of Grammatology (translation with critical introduction of Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie, 1976); Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (1993); Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993); A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999); Death of a Discipline (2003), and Other Asias (2005. Her translations of the Indian writer Mahasweta Devi includes Imaginary Maps (1994); Breast Stories (1997), Old Women (1999); Chotti Munda and His Arrow (a novel, 2002); Her translation from eighteenth century Bengali mystical lyric is entitled Song for Kali: A Cycle (translation with introduction of Ramproshad Sen, 2000). "Righting Wrongs" (2003) and "Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching" (2004); "Translating into English" (2005) are recent articles that reflect Spivak's activism and her concern for human rights. Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. She is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000), Hegemony, Contingency, Universality, with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, (Verso Press, 2000). In 2004, she published a collection of writings on war's impact on language and thought entitled Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning with Verso Press. That same year, The Judith Butler Reader appeared, edited by Sara Salih, with Blackwell Publishers. A collection of her essays on gender and sexuality, Undoing Gender, appeared with Routledge in 2004 as well. Her most recent book, Giving an Account of Oneself, appeared with Fordham University Press (2005) and considers the partial opacity of the subject, and the relation between critique and ethical reflection. She is currently working on essays pertaining to Jewish Philosophy, focusing on pre-Zionist criticisms of state violence. She continues to write on cultural and literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, and sexual politics.