What Benjamin Read (& Saw)
We envision this working group as something of a salon where faculty
and graduate students will be able to discuss the work of Walter Benjamin. In contrast
to other Townsend groups devoted to Critical Theory, our aim is not solely to read
Benjamin and his contemporaries, but to read with him—to read what he read and take
time to look at what he saw. We wish to put Benjamin’s thought in dialogue with the
philosophers, thinkers, artists, and cities with which he was engaged—especially those
Animal Studies Working Group
The emergent discipline of Animal Studies looks both to complicate the ways in which the demarcation between human and animal worlds has been achieved, maintained, enacted, and performed throughout history and to explore the ways in which animals and the human-animal relationship have been represented in discursive formations from the premodern fable to early cinema, Modernist literature, and most recently, televisual representations of wildlife such as National Geographic’s “Crittercam.” This working group will investigate the recent turn towards de-centering the humanist assumptions upon
Phenomenology Working Group
