Distinguished Residencies | Lectures | Panels, Symposia, Conferences | Faculty Bookwatch | Wednesdays

LECTURES

Each year, the FHI presents numerous lectures from scholars, writers, and artists from a wide range of disciplines. In addition to lectures associated with our Annual Seminar and Distinguished Scholars in Residence program, we host the A.W. Mellon Annual Lecture and the Current Residents series. We also sponsor and co-sponsor many other lectures outside these series constructs.

2007-08 PROGRAMS

By Month:
September 2007 || October 2007 || November 2007 || December 2007 || January 2008 || February 2008 || March 2008 || April 2008

By Speaker:
Jane Anderson || Waseem Anwar || Maurice Benayoun || Bill Brown || Roger Chartier || Yvette Christiansë || Dale Kinney || Stephanie Grant || Deirdre McCloskey || Megan Moodie || Martin Puchner || Elizabeth Povinelli || Andrew Russell || Nancy Scheper-Hughes || Matthew Stahl || Romila Thapar (1 & 2) || Michael Warner || Ken Wissoker || Ernest Zitser

2007-08 LECTURES
	Wednesday, September 5, 2007, 12:00 PM Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center How Capitalism Became Ethical, 1600-1848 Deirdre McCloskey Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication, University of Illinois at Chicago Professor of Social Thought, Academia Vitae, Deventer [ download pdf flyer ] Presented by Recycle, the 2007-08 Franklin Humanities Institute Seminar About the Speaker: Deirdre N. McCloskey has been since 2000 UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and was Visiting Tinbergen Professor (2002-2006) of Philosophy, Economics, and Art and Cultural Studies at Erasmus University of Rotterdam. Trained at Harvard as an economist, she has written fourteen books and edited seven more, and has published some three hundred and sixty articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, feminism, ethics, and law. Her latest books are The Secret Sins of Economics (Prickly Paradigm Pamphlets, U. of Chicago Press, 2002), The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives [with Stephen Ziliak; University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 2008], and The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Capitalism (U. of Chicago Press, 2006). RELATED EVENT: Thursday, September 6, 2007, 5:30 PM Center for LGBT Life (02 West Union Building, West Campus) It Helps to Be a Don If You're Going to Be a Deirdre: An Informal Discussion Presented with the Center for LGBT Life - for more information, e-mail lgbtcenter@duke.edu. [ back to top ]
	Tuesday, September 11, 4:30 PM Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center *Unrecyclables: Some Thoughts on the Medieval Reuse of Ancient Gems* Dale Kinney Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of History of Art, Bryn Mawr College Presented by Recycle, the 2007-08 Franklin Humanities Institute Seminar About the Speaker: Dale Kinney's research specialty is medieval art and architecture from the fourth through 12th centuries, with a focus on Rome. Some of her most recent articles can be found in Word & Image (2002), Reading Medieval Images (2002), and Making Medieval Art (2003). She has won numerous fellowships in support of her research, including fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has served as editor of the journal GESTA (1997-2000), and is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the College Art Association (2002-2007). [ back to top ]
	Wednesday, September 12, 2007, 5:30 PM Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University Digital Wanderings: From Immersion to Critical Fusion Maurice Benayoun Media Artist Presented by Interface, the 2006-07 Franklin Humanities Institute Seminar and the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies About the Speaker: Maurice Benayoun (Mo Ben) is a media artist born in 1957. His work explores the potentiality of various media from video to virtual reality, Web and wireless art, public space large scale art installations and interactive exhibitions. Benayoun's work has been widely exhibited all over the world and received numerous international awards and prizes. Co-founder in 1987 of Z-A (Paris) a pioneer CG and VR lab, Maurice Benayoun, between 1990 and 1993, writes with François Schuiten and directs The Quarxs, the first HDTV CG series widely awarded and broadcast in m ore than 15 countries. In 1993, he is prize-winner of the Villa Medicis Hors Les Murs of the Foreign Ministry for his Art After Museum project, a contemporary art collection in virtual reality. [ back to top ]
	Wednesday, September 19, 12-1 PM Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center Wednesdays at the Center: A Poetics of Sacrifice in Toni Morrison's Fiction Yvette Christiansë Associate Professor, English & Comparative Literature, Fordham University Author, Unconfessed: A Novel , 2007Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award Finalist Yvette Christiansë is FHI Distinguished Scholar in Residence from September 17 to September 28, 2007. For more information on this lecture and other programs during her residency, click here. [ back to top ]
	Wednesday, October 10, 5:30 PM Room 230/232, John Hope Franklin Center *An Atavistic Cutting Edge? Conceptualizing Creative Work in the Culture Industries* Matthew Wheelock Stahl Assistant Professor of Media and Communication, Muhlenberg College Presented by Recycle, the 2007-08 Franklin Humanities Institute Seminar and Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS) About the Lecture: This presentation approaches cultural labor in terms of its political-economic and historical/theoretical relationship with other forms of work in market society, with a particular concern for issues of autonomy, appropriation and alienation. The focus is on the "lines" that are drawn in custom and law between those whose work produces inalienable property - and thus the potential material-legal basis for resistance to particular forms of domination and dispossession - and those whose cultural work produces alienable property - and thus only claims on wages (and other contractually determined benefits) - roughly, that is, between authors/owners and employees. These two general categories are understood to express a limited range of relations of domination and dispossession; the lines between these categories are political and their placement is determined through struggles that are particular to each cultural field and given historical contexts. This framework supports the analysis of cultural work not only as on a continuum with other forms of work in market society, but also as a site of the reiteration of supposedly long-finished processes and conditions of appropriation (such as "proletarianization" and "primitive accumulation") bringing into high relief the fact that appropriation is a fact of life in the present. This approach, moreover, provides a way of analyzing and evaluating the contemporary proliferation of fiction and nonfiction representations of cultural work with respect to the ongoing reorganization of work under expanding neoliberal political-economic regimes. About the Speaker: From Professor Stahl: I dropped out of UC Berkeley shortly after the 1989 earthquake, figuring if time was as short as it then seemed, it was probably better spent rocking. During the nineties I played with several Bay Area indie bands, working in warehouses, factories, retail and restaurants to support myself. As the dotcom boom deracinated and displaced musicians and artists I returned to Berkeley to complete a BA in Mass Communication and went from there to UC San Diego for a PhD in Communication. As a practicing musician and wage laborer I had learned much about these seemingly disparate worlds of production - at Berkeley and then UCSD I began to understand and further explore their relationship in more systematic ways. I've since studied and written about work in animation and music-making, as well as their representation in the mass media. It's my hope that through my own experience and my discipline's critical perspectives I can contribute to the expanding conversations about forms and relations of creative work, particularly with respect to their changing symbolic and material place in the social division of labor. [ back to top ]
	Thursday, October 11, 4:30 PM Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center Recognizing Historical Traditions in Early India Romila Thapar Professor Emeritus of History, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India Romila Thapar is FHI Distinguished Scholar in Residence from October 8 to November 3, 2007. For more information on this lecture (1st of 2) and other programs during her residency, click here. [ back to top ]
Share on Facebook	Thursday, October 18, 4:30 PM Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center *The World Cut in Half: Global Injustice & the Traffic in Organs* Nancy Scheper-Hughes Chancellor's Professor of Medical Anthropology & Director of Organs Watch, University of California, Berkeley Presented by Recycle, the 2007-08 Franklin Humanities Institute Seminar and Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS) About the Speaker: Nancy Scheper-Hughes is currently Chancellor’s Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley where she directs the doctoral program in medical anthropology: “Critical Studies in Medicine, Science and the Body.” For the last decade Scheper-Hughes has been involved in a multi-sited, ethnographic and medical human rights oriented study of the global traffic in organs. As Director of the university-based Organs Watch Project (originally funded by the Soros Foundation) Scheper-Hughes traveled to the sites and scenes of human trafficking for transplant organs in a dozen countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, North America, and Southeast Asia. She investigated the criminal networks that bring together desperate buyers and equally desperate kidney sellers, surgeons, and local organs brokers. She has collaborated with Ministries of Health, international transplant societies, the WHO, the Council of Europe, members of Parliament and other government leaders as well as with police in their efforts to interrupt human trafficking and black markets in organs to supply what is politely called “international transplant tourism”. As a senior fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University last year (2006-2007) Scheper-Hughes completed a book manuscript, A World Cut in Two: the Global Traffic in Organs that analyses the emergence and spread of organs commerce as an uncivil practice, a new form of sacrificial violence, as well as a lens on late modern conceptions of life, death, human frailty, futility, kinship, reciprocity, scarcity, and need. She argues that global transplant practices, especially illicit ones, give a unique view of who we are at the present time, how we imagine ourselves and our bodies in relation to others, intimate family members and strangers. Finally, she questions traditional professional ethics (both anthropological and medical) and calls for a passionately engaged and ‘militant anthropology’ based on a radical view of ethical obligations to the body of the other. Scheper-Hughes is also author of many other publications, including Death without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (U of California Press, 1993), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. [ back to top ]
Share on Facebook	Friday, October 26, 2007, 12:00 PM 240 John Hope Franklin Center Theater and Philosophy: Socrates on the Modern Stage Martin Puchner H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University Presented with the Departments of English and Theater Studies and the Program in Literature About the Speaker: Martin Puchner is the author of Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Hopkins, 2002) and Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton, 2006). He has published or has essays forthcoming in the London Review of Books, Raritan Review, Yale Journal of Criticism, The Drama Review, The Journal of the History of Ideas, New Literary History, Theatre Research International, and Theatre Journal among others. His edited books and introductions include Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen (Barnes and Noble, 2003), Lionel Abel's Tragedy and Metatheatre (Holmes and Meier, 2003), The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings (Barnes and Noble, 2005), and Modern Drama: Critical Concepts (Routledge, forthcoming). He is also co-editor of Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage (Palgrave, 2006) and of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Drama. He is the editor of Theatre Survey. About the Lecture: Most philosophy makes little mention of the theater except to denounce it as a place of illusion and moral decay. The theater has responded in kind and steered away from philosophy, driven by the truism that drama consists of actions, not ideas. Despite this mutual evasion, the histories of philosophy and theater have been crucially intertwined. I take my point of departure from a reading of Plato's dialogues as a form of drama. Although Plato was critical of the theater prevalent in fifth-century Athens, including the chorus, actors, plot structures, and mass audiences, he forged a dramatic form of his own. Plato's pre-Aristotelian dramaturgy becomes the lens through which to consider the main material of this talk: the little-known history of dramatic adaptations of Plato's dialogues, what I call the Socrates play. Most Socrates plays were written since the eighteenth century and with increasing frequency in the early twentieth century by playwrights associated with modern drama. The history of the Socrates play thus becomes an occasion for excavating a modernist Platonism as well as for rethinking the relation between drama and philosophy more broadly. RELATED EVENT: Thursday, October 25, 2007, 4:30 PM Rare Book Room, Perkins Library, West Campus Faculty Bookwatch \| Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen & the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy Professor Puchner will be one of three panelists discussing Professor Moi's acclaimed re-consideration of Ibsen. For more information, click here. [ back to top ]
	Wednesday, October 31, 4:30 PM Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center *Trends in the Interpretations of Early Indian History* Romila Thapar Professor Emeritus of History, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India Romila Thapar is FHI Distinguished Scholar in Residence from October 8 to November 3, 2007. For more information on this lecture (2nd of 2) and other programs during her residency, click here. [ back to top ]
	Monday, November 26, 2007, 1:30 PM Room 204, Science Building (Old Art Museum), East Campus Recognizing Digital Divisions, Circulating Socialities Elizabeth Povinelli Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University Elizabeth Povinelli is FHI Distinguished Scholar in Residence from November 26 to December 7, 2007. For more information on this lecture and other programs during her residency, click here.
	Tuesday, January 15, 2008, 4:30 PM Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center Objects, Others, and Us Bill Brown Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor Chair, Department of English University of Chicago Presented by Recycle, the 2007-08 Franklin Humanities Institute Seminar About the Speaker: His past research has focused on popular literary genres (e.g. science fiction, the Western), on recreational forms (baseball, kung fu), and on the ways that mass-cultural phenomena (from roller coasters to kodak cameras) impress themselves on the literary imagination. His current work operates at the intersection of literary, visual, and material cultures, with an emphasis on what he terms "object relations in an expanded field." Asking how inanimate objects enable human subjects (individually and collectively) to form and transform themselves, his recent writings - notably in "Thing Theory," his contribution to the 2001 Critical Inquiry special issue on Things, which he also edited - have pondered how things and thingness might become new objects of critical analysis. He is the author of The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (Harvard, 1996), Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Novels (Bedford Books, 1997), and A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago, 2003).
	Wednesday, January 23, 2008, 12:00-1:00 PM Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center Wednesdays at the Center: Research the Novel: The Problem of Serendipity Stephanie Grant Visiting Writer, Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University Author of The Passion of Alice and Map of Ireland Stephanie Grant (see full bio here) will give a brief talk which examines the ways in which historical research can enhance -- and sometimes hinder -- the creative process. Grant will focus on her experiences researching her second novel, Map of Ireland, forthcoming from Scribner in March, 2008. Map of Ireland is a contemporary re-telling of Huck Finn set during the desegregation of the Boston Public Schools in 1974. The novel places female friendship and sexuality at the center of a foundational American myth about race.
	Thursday, February 21, 2008, 5:30 PM Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University 2008 A. W. Mellon / John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Distinguished Lecture: Cardenio between the Sierra Morena, Whitehall and Parisian Stages Roger Chartier Chair of Writings and Cultures in Modern Europe, Collège de France Professor of History, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales Annenberg Visiting Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania About the Speaker: Roger Chartier has also lectured and taught in Spain, México, Brazil and Argentina. His work in Early Modern European History is rooted in the tradition of the "Annales School" and is dedicated to the history of education, the history of the book, and the history of reading, as well as the interdisciplinary links between philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. His most recent work focuses on the relationship between written culture and dramatic performance in France, England, and Spain. His books and edited works include Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer; The Order of Books; A History of Reading in the West; On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language and Practices; and Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations. Professor Chartier will also participate in the *Books Without a Future?* symposium on Friday, February 22. Click here for more information.
	Wednesday, February 27, 2008, 5:30 PM Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center Writing for Readers: Scholarly Publishing in a Changing Climate Ken Wissoker Editorial Director, Duke University Press With Courtney Berger, Associate Editor, Duke University Press in Q & A Part of the Scholarly Publishing Series presented by the Franklin Humanities Institute in partnership with the Duke University Press. Made possible by a multi-year grant from the A. W. Mellon Foundation. More information coming soon
	Tuesday, March 4, 2008, 4:30 PM Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center Modularity: From Modern Architecture to Postmodern Technologies Andrew L. Russell Postdoctoral Fellow, Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University Part of Current Residents, a lecture series featuring visiting scholars and fellows at Duke About the Lecture: By the turn of the twenty-first century, it had become common for a wide range of professionals--from computer scientists and economists to psychologists and neurooscientists--to use the language of modularity to describe their respective fields of endeavor. Yet, only 80 years earlier, this language was absent from all professional discourse. This talk traces the history of modular concepts from their first articulation in the Depression-era building industry to their seemingly ubiquitous use in the 1990s. This history suggests that modularity, first embraced as a modern means for rationalizing the chaotic building industry, emerged as a powerful tool for managing the complexities of the postmodern information age. About the Speaker: Andrew L. Russell is Postdoctoral Fellow in the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Seminar for 2007-2008. He earned a Ph.D. in the History of Science and Technology from The Johns Hopkins University in 2007. He is a graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder (M.A. History, 2003) and Vassar College (B.A. History, 1996). Before attending graduate school he worked for two years in the Harvard Information Infrastructure Project at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
	Wednesday, March 5, 2008, 12:00-1:00 PM Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center Wednesdays at the Center: Towards an Ethnography of Freedom Megan Moodie Mellon-Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow, Duke University About the Lecture: This talk will be based on Moodie's anthropological fieldwork in the city of Jaipur, capital of the north Indian state of Rajasthan, with an urban tribal group known as the Dhanka who have been obvious beneficiaries of the project of social uplift that characterizes a particularly Indian vision of freedom. It argues that we can study the life of big ideas like freedom "on the ground," in the kinds of sociality that emerge in their name; unlike many feminists who have taken up this challenge to traditional political theorizing, however, it contends that freedom, in particular, is a site of material and discursive production that should remain central to our activist and academic projects. Using examples from her ethnography of new collective marriage festivals among the Dhanka, Moodie will sketch an outline of what such a project might look like. About the Speaker: Megan Moodie received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently Postdoctoral Fellow in the 2007-08 Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Portents and Dilemmas: Health and Environment in China and India, co-convened by Duke faculty Ralph Litzinger (Cultural Anthropology) and Dominic Sachsenmaier.
	Monday, March 17, 2008, 4:30 PM Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center *Sex and Secularity* Michael Warner Professor of English and American Studies, Yale University Presented with the Program in the Study of Sexualities & Department of English Michael Warner is FHI Distinguished Scholar in Residence from March 17 to March 24, 2008. For more information on this lecture and other programs during her residency, click here.
	Wednesday, April 2, 2008, 4:30 PM Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center Intellectual Property & Indigenous Knowledge Jane Anderson Postdoctoral Fellow, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University About the Lecture: This paper will critically assess current debates and arguments regarding the protection of Indigenous/traditional knowledge within local, national and international contexts. Drawing from a range of examples derived from work in and with local communities, the aim is to reconcile the different expectations and desires articulated within community locales, with national and international policy and legislative initiatives currently on offer. The paper examines the diverse kinds of meaning that are being produced about intellectual property rights in Indigenous/local community contexts and questions how these interpretations are being translated into broader national and international policy making spaces. It seeks to develop a more nuanced understanding about the failures of international policy making in this area so that they might be productively overcome in the future. About the Speaker: Jane Anderson is Postdoctoral Fellow in Recycle, the 2007-2008 John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Seminar. Prior to this appointment Jane has held fellowships at New York University, Edinburgh University, the Smithsonian Institution and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Jane’s work is focused on intellectual property law and the protection of Indigenous/traditional knowledge and cultural heritage. She has worked on a range of intellectual property and Indigenous knowledge projects with Indigenous communities and organizations. In Australia these projects have focused on addressing Indigenous interests in access, control and ownership of ethnographic materials within libraries, archives and museums and the digital repatriation of this cultural material back to communities. As part of a research team sponsored by the Ford Foundation, Social Science Research Council and the Lembaga Studi Pers dan Pambangunan (LSPP) in Indonesia, Jane has worked with local artists and community leaders, non-governmental organizations and Indonesian government officials to develop alternative legal strategies for the protection of traditional artistic expressions across the Indonesian archipelago. Jane is also currently engaged as a Consultant for the World Intellectual Property Organization where she is working on several projects, one if which is the development of practical guidelines for Indigenous and local communities when developing intellectual property protocols. Jane holds a PhD in Law from the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her book Law/Knowledge/Culture: The Production of Indigenous Knowledge in Intellectual Property Law is forthcoming from Edward Elgar Press in the UK.
	Wednesday, April 9, 2008, 5:00 PM* Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center *Note correct start time Towards a Full-Frontal History of Imperial Russia: Recycling Political Pornography at the Franklin Humanities Institute Ernest Zitser Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies + Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies + 2007-08 Library Fellow, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University Presented with the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies About the Lecture: This presentation will seek to contribute to the theme of this year’s FHI Recycle Seminar by tracing the life-cycle of a rare artifact of Russian visual culture – namely, a series of five erotic, hand-colored watercolor drawings, depicting 18th-century Imperial rulers and their favorites (of both sexes) in flagrante delicto – from its origins as clandestine political pornography in the nineteenth-century to its public unveiling as an historical artifact in the twenty-first. In narrating the social biography of this object, Zitser asks: What is Russian political pornography? What is “Russian” or “pornographic” about it? Whose politics does it represent? And what role do such respectable American institutions as the New York Public Library and the Franklin Humanities Institute have to play in its cultural recycling, and, more broadly, in the re-circulation of (objects of) desire over time, within and across different segments of society, and between societies? The presentation will propose that in this particular case, recycling (or res-cycling) refers to a historically-informed methodological approach of looking at the entire life-cycle of an object (Lat. res), not merely individual phases in its public life; and of paying attention to the way the salvage operations, re-appropriations, and transformations performed by various actors under different regimes of the circulation of things effect the value of both objects and the political communities (publics) that re-collect such items (res publicae). About the Speaker: Ernest (“Erik”) Zitser received his Ph.D. in Russian History from Columbia University and worked consecutively as a post-doctoral Fellow, Center Associate, and Librarian of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of the 2004 book, The Transfigured Kingdom: Sacred Parody and Charismatic Authority at the Court of Peter the Great (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press; Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, forthcoming 2008), and has published a number of articles in both historical and library journals on a wide variety of topics, including sober drunkenness at the early modern Russian court, post-war Soviet photo-propaganda, and Russian nationalism in post-Soviet cinema.
	Wednesday, April 23, 2008 Lunch at 12 PM* / Talk at 12:30 Room 130/2, John Hope Franklin Center * RSVP for lunch to fhi@duke.edu by Monday 4/21 Theorizing the Pakistani Post-Postcolonial Real: Ambivalent, Emergent or Amorphous! Waseem Anwar Professor and Chair of English, Forman Christian College, Lahore, Pakistan Fulbright Visiting Scholar (2007-08), Department of English, Duke University Presented with the Department of English and North Carolina Center for South Asia Studies About the Lecture: This talk challenges what has been termed as the “real” about the Indo-Pak Subcontinent from the oversimplified East-West binary perspective. In doing so, it rearticulates some of the literary, critical and theoretical implications about the specific Pakistani post-postcolonial scenario. Raising questions of periodization (postcolonial or post-postcolonial?) and aesthetics, the lecture engages in a dialogue with Homi K. Bhabha’s ideas of nationhood and ambivalence. It asks if the "emergent" in the post-postcolonial Pakistan stays “ambivalent” - or has grown amorphous! Dr. Anwar coins the amorphous, the anomalous and confusingly unclassifiable or difficult, as a literary term to address the real about Pakistani systems – politico-religious, socio-cultural as well as academic. In mapping this difficult conceptual terrain, the talk invites other critics to ponder the applicability of amorphousness to similar condition/s among the many countries bearing with the aftermath of colonization. About the Speaker: Professor and Chair of English at Forman Christian College, Lahore, Pakistan, Dr. Waseem Anwar has also been the President of Fulbright Alumni Association Lahore Chapter (2004-07). A second time Fulbright fellow (first for his doctorate in 1995), he is currently a postdoctoral Visiting Scholar (2007-08) in the Department of English at Duke. Dr. Anwar has published in literary journals and academic magazines and served on the Advisory Board of Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy. The title of his postdoctoral research is “Exploring the E/Merging American Literatures (A Ls) in English: Change or Challenge?” The project traces the merging/emerging - including electronically merging - patterns in recent US literary history, in order to explore how, from the Pakistani perspective, A Ls may foreground challenging dimensions to regional English literary studies and cultural policies. The final objective is to acknowledge the culture of difference. Dr. Anwar trusts to connect the theocracy of individualism to the technocracy of globalism through the cybernetic aesthetics of an expressive realism of the future, be it ambivalent or amorphous!