Videos

Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley

Politics and Knowledge in Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber. The first, “Politics”

October 22, 2019

Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Chair at UC Berkeley, where she teaches political theory. Drawing from Freudian, Weberian, Marxist, and Foucauldian angles of vision, she writes about the powers operating beneath...

David Spergel, Astrophysicist

Mapping the Universe

October 14, 2019

When cosmologists map the universe, they are imaging its past. Our measurements of the cosmic microwave background fluctuations map the universe’s condition only a few hundred thousand years after the big bang. These...

Brian Scassellati, Yale

Mapping the Frontier between Man and Machine

September 4, 2019

People divide the world into objects (like rocks and toasters) and agents (like people and dogs).  How do we decide where robots should fall along this divide?  In this talk, Professor Brian Scassellati discusses...

Steven Strogatz, Mathematician

The Beauty of Calculus

April 26, 2019

Steven Strogatz is an applied mathematician who works in the areas of nonlinear dynamics and complex systems, often on topics inspired by the curiosities of everyday life–and often finding math...

Gary Tomlinson, Yale

The Third Algorithm: The Evolution of Human Culture

April 18, 2019

How did human culture take on the complexity manifest in all societies today? Gary Tomlinson adopts a long perspective to answer this question, looking back across the last 500,000 years. Joining capacities of early...

Anupama Rao, Barnard College

Social Abstraction, Historical Comparison: Thinking Caste, Race, and Gender in the Time Capital

April 9, 2019

Anupama Rao is Associate Professor of History at Barnard College, Senior Editor of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and Acting Director of the Institute for Comparative...

Gyanendra Pandey, Emory University

Modernity in the Home: A Reflection on 20th Century India

April 2, 2019

Gyanendra Pandey is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor and Director of the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at Emory University. A founding member and leading...

lona Katzew, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The Invention of Casta Painting: Race and Science in the Age of Enlightenment

February 26, 2019

Ilona Katzew is Department Head and Curator of Latin American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her exhibitions include New World OrdersInventing Race: Casta Painting and Eighteenth-Century...

Paul Edwards, Stanford University

"Truth Under Siege: Making Climate Knowledge in an Age of Transparency, Skepticism, and Science Denial"

February 25, 2019

Paul Edwards is William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at Stanford University and Professor of Information and History (Emeritus) at the University of Michigan. He writes and teaches about the history,...

Deborah Thomas, University of Pennsylvania

"Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Affect, Witnessing, Repair"

February 12, 2019

Deborah Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Exceptional Violence: Embodied...