Franke Visiting Fellows

Bernard Geoghegan, Coventry University

Wednesday, November 8, 2017 | 5:00 pm

The Difficulty of Gift-Giving: Cybernetics and Postwar French Thought

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, the Fall 2017 Franke Visiting Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center, will give a lecture titled “The Difficulty of Gift-Giving: Cybernetics and Postwar French Thought” on Wednesday, November 8, at 5 pm in Room 208 of the WHC.

A historian and theorist of digital media, Geoghegan is a senior lecturer in Media and Communications at Coventry University and a visiting associate professor in Film and Media Studies at Yale University. He also works as a curator and educational programmer for the Anthropocene Project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany. His research investigates how changes in media technology interweave with changes in popular culture, science, and the physical environment. He has edited essay collections on media philosopher Gilbert Simondon, on media and the occult, and on media theorist Friedrich Kittler. Geoghegan’s essays and translations appear in journals including Critical Inquiry, SubStance, IEEE Annals on the History of Computing, and Theory, Culture & Society. He is currently writing a book with Francesco Casetti on screening as a cultural technique that examines the history of managing environments and space through screen-based media technologies such as radar and global positioning systems.

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"What Translation Means: The Extent and Impact of Translation in America"

For twelve years, Augenbraum was Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards. He has translated, among other works, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’sChronicle of the Narváez Expedition and the Filipino novelist José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. In 2012, the University of Texas Press published his co-translation (with Ilan Stavans) of The Plain in Flames by Juan Rulfo; in 2013, Penguin Classics published his edition of the Collected Poems of Marcel Proust.

Harold Augenbraum, American writer, editor, and translator

Tuesday, February 21, 2017 | 5:00 pm

What Translation Means: The Extent and Impact of Translation in America

For twelve years, Augenbraum was Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards. He has translated, among other works, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition and the Filipino novelist José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. In 2012, the University of Texas Press published his co-translation (with Ilan Stavans) of The Plain in Flames by Juan Rulfo; in 2013, Penguin Classics published his edition of the Collected Poems of Marcel Proust. He is currently carrying out a research project on the business of translation in the United States under a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2015, Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, awarded him the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa.

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Peter Cole

Tuesday, September 12, 2006 | 4:30 pm

Real Gazelles in Imaginary Gardens: Art, Scholarship, and the Translation of Medieval Hebrew Poems from Muslim Spain

Tuesday, September 12, “Real Gazelles in Imaginary Gardens: Art, Scholarship, and the Translation of Medieval Hebrew Poems from Muslim Spain”

Claudia Roden

Thursday, October 28, 2010 | 5:00 pm

A Good Soup Holds History and Culture: Reconstructing Worlds through Food

Thursday, October 28, “A Good Soup Holds History and Culture: Reconstructing Worlds through Food”

Romancing Spinoza

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, a novelist, biographer, and professor of philosophy, delivers the Franke Lecture in the Fall of 2012 on the influences of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza upon literature and the enlightenment. Goldstein challenges a cultural portrait of Spinoza as distant from aesthetic concerns, and meditates upon Spinoza’s imprint upon writers including Melville, Goethe, George Eliot, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Heine.

Luis Fernández-Galiano

Wednesday, October 24, 2007 | 4:30 pm

Thinking with Images

Wednesday, October 24, “Thinking with Images”

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Adina Hoffman

Tuesday, October 7, 2008 | 5:00 pm

Map of a Vanished Town: Recollecting the Palestinian Past Through Biography

Tuesday, October 7, “Map of a Vanished Town: Recollecting the Palestinian Past Through Biography”

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Piotr Sommer

Tuesday, October 20, 2009 | 4:30 pm

Overdoing It and Other Poems

Tuesday, October 20, “Overdoing It and Other Poems”

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Carolyn Abbate

Tuesday, February 10, 2015 | 5:00 pm

Sound Object Lessons

Carolyn Abbate is Professor of Music at Harvard University. She received a BA from Yale and a PhD from Princeton. She has held faculty positions at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, and as a visiting professor at the Freie Universität Berlin, and held research fellowships and lectureships at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin, Kings College Cambridge, the University of Hong Kong, and the Institute for Advanced Study.

Outside academia, she has worked as a dramaturge and director. Many of her writings focus on opera, from its beginnings around 1600 through the twenty-first century. She has also published essays on musical automata, film music, ephemeral art, and operetta’s ethical frivolity. Her latest book, coauthored with Roger Parker, is A History of Opera: The Last 400 Years (2012).

Her current project on sound in the Machine Age deals with issues that range from knowledge of the human sensorium and listening in past eras, and artisanal practices of supplying music in film exhibition, to how alternative, vernacular philosophies of musical meaning grew from cinematic sound design and its technologies in the 1920s and 30s. In 2014, she was named a University Professor, Harvard’s highest honor for a faculty member.

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