Ernst Kapp’s 1877 Elements of a Philosophy of Technology is nothing less than the emergence of early elements of a cybernetic paradigm. Kapp applies the theory of organ projection to various areas of the material world—the axe externalizes the arm, the telegraphic system the neural network—studying the human body and its relationship with the world that surrounds it.

Join us to celebrate the launch of the book with its newest editors, Leif Weatherby (Associate Professor Of German, NYU) and Jeffrey Kirkwood (Professor of Art History, Binghamton University), and other featured panelists to discuss the 1877 treatise that coined the phrase "philosophy of technology," which appeared in late 2018 in English for the first time. Featuring:

Lisa Gitelman
Professor of Media and English, NYU

John Durham Peters
María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film & Media Studies, Yale University

How does the periodical help us to tell cultural histories at the local and global level? What roles has the periodical played historically in circulating art, and how has this affected our histories of art and its display and transmission?

This panel gathers together curators, archivists, literary and art historians to assess the state of global periodical studies and its intersection with art history, to develop a framework for examining magazines as a mode of circulation and exhibition of artwork across national boundaries, both historically and today.

Panelists will be announced shortly.

The injuries suffered by soldiers during WWI were as varied as they were brutal. How could the human body suffer and often absorb such disparate traumas? Why might the same wound lead one soldier to die but allow another to recover?

In The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe , Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers uncover a fascinating story of how medical scientists came to conceptualize the body as an integrated yet brittle whole. Responding to the harrowing experience of the Great War, the medical community sought conceptual frameworks to understand bodily shock, brain injury, and the vast differences in patient responses they occasioned. Geroulanos and Meyers carefully trace how this emerging constellation of ideas became essential for thinking about integration, individuality, fragility, and collapse far beyond medicine: in fields as diverse as anthropology, political economy, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics.

Join us for an in-depth discussion with the authors and other featured panelists analyzing the various themes and stories surrounding these ideas. Panelists TBA.

This talk will address the current surge in environmental martyrdom against the backdrop of the resource wars across the global South. Rob Nixon asks: what is the relationship between the sacrificial figure of the environmental martyr and the proliferation of sacrifice zones under neoliberal globalization? And, in the battles over the fate of the planet’s forests, what is the relationship between the fallen martyr and the felled tree?

Featuring Rob Nixon, Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Family Professor in the Humanities and the Environment at Princeton University and author of his most recent book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.