Workshop Schedule

Winter Quarter 2025

All workshops will meet in Campus North 154 at 5:15 PM on the Thursdays listed below.

The entrance to the building is to the right of Fairgrounds Coffee Shop.

The workshop is a peanut-free event to accommodate a serious allergy. Please do not bring any products containing peanuts to the workshop.

January 30

“The Will of Nature: The Imagination of the City in Measure for Measure”

Ben Jeffery

Society of Fellows, University of Chicago

Respondent: Magnus Ferguson

Society of Fellows, University of Chicago


February 27

“Dissociative Narrating and Vigilant Reading in W.G. Sebald”

Yun Ha Kim

PhD Candidate, Germanic Studies, University of Chicago

Respondent: Catriona Macleod

Vice Provost for the Arts; Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor in the College and the Department of Germanic Studies

Society of Fellows, University of Chicago


March 6

“Towards a Poetics of Passivity: Stanley Cavell’s Philosophy of Film”

Sam Lee

PhD Candidate, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago

Respondent: Daniel Morgan

Director of Graduate Studies; Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies and the College

Society of Fellows, University of Chicago


Fall Quarter 2024

Literature and Philosophy Workshop Fall Schedule

All workshops will meet in Campus North 154 at 5:15 PM on the Thursdays listed below.

The entrance to the building is to the right of Fairgrounds Coffee Shop.

The workshop is a peanut-free event to accommodate a serious allergy. Please do not bring any products containing peanuts to the workshop.

October 17

“Violent Naïveté: Reading Adorno’s Homer Excursus with Schiller”

Rachel Wong, PhD Candidate, Social Thought

Respondent: Andrei Pop

Allan and Jean Frumkin Professor, Committee on Social Thought, Art History, and the College


October 24

“Ludwig Hohl’s Elemental Poetics of Action”

Margareta Ingrid Christian, Associate Professor, Germanic Studies

Respondent: Nicholas Andes, PhD Student, Germanic Studies 


November 7

“Concepts of Mind in Poetry and Philosophy:

Apprehension and Idrāk Across Early Modern Eurasia”

Timothy Harrison, Associate Professor, English and Social Thought

Jane Mikkelson, Assistant Professor of the Humanities, Yale University

Respondent: Mark Payne

Chester D. Tripp Professor, Classics, Comparative Literature, Social Thought, and the College


November 14

“Buber, Rilke, Benjamin: Poetic Transformation and the Capacity for Responsiveness”

Alicia Badea, PhD Student, Germanic Studies

Respondent: Florian Klinger

Associate Professor in Germanic Studies and the College


November 21

“Kafka’s Martyrdom of Ridicule: On Hunger as Function and Ornament”

Simon Hajdini, Senior Research Associate, Philosophy, University of Ljubljana

Respondent: Kiki Lerer

PhD Student, English, University of Chicago


December 5

“Lessing’s Reception of Ibn Ṭufayl:

“The reception of Ibn Ṭufayl in the late German Enlightenment: Reading Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem and Lessing’s Über die Entstehung der geoffenbarten Religion

Emir Faruk Kayahan, PhD Student, Germanic Studies

Respondent: Timothy Harrison

Associate Professor, English and Social Thought