Fall 2026 Event Series
Please check the details of each event for format and location. All events, as always, are free and open to the public.
"Revisiting Fanon and Négritude"
Carmen De Schryver // Trinity College
Philosophy Colloquium Series
- September 4
- 3:00pm
- Clement Hall 317
Join the Philosophy Department for a lecture and discussion with Carmen De Schryver, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College. Dr. De Schryver specializes in Africana Philosophy and Phenomenology.
The Pinch Release Party
- Saturday, September 19
- 6:00pm
- novel. Bookstore (387 Perkins Extd., Memphis, TN 38117)
Join us on Saturday, September 19th as we celebrate the release of The Pinch Literary Journal Issue 46.2! The release party will start at 6pm at novel. bookstore and feature readings from current authors.
"Fierce Desires: Variation, Conflict, and Pleasure in the History of American Sexuality"
Rebecca L. Davis // University of Delaware
Belle McWilliams Lecture Series
- Thursday, September 24
- Reception @ 5:30pm // Lecture @ 6:00pm
- McWherter Library, 2nd Floor Commons
- Convenient parking in the Zach Curlin Garage
In the United States today, we have government decrees that there are only two sexes, debates about “trad wives” and polyamory, and frequent references to the nation’s “puritan” past. But in her latest book—and in this talk—Professor Rebecca L. Davis argues that seventeenth-century Puritans are a weak precedent for how the history of sexuality has unfolded in the United States. Into the 1800s, the United States was far more welcoming of gender nonconformity and same-sex/queer desires than we might presume. Instead, a significant shift occurred in the late nineteenth century, when anti-obscenity and anti-immigration legislation vastly expanded the federal government’s investment in shaping sexual morality. The history that unfolds is far less about prudish puritans than shifting sexual values. Our contemporary conflicts over sex and gender highlight the power of this surprising history.
Rebecca L. Davis is a historian of sexuality, gender, race, and religion in the United States and the author or editor of four books. Her most recent book, Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America, was a one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year, a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year, a 2025 finalist for the Lambda Literary Lammy Award in LGBTQ+ nonfiction, and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. A professor of History and a professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware, her work—spanning books, essays, and podcasts—aims to make the past newly relevant to contemporary debates about bodies, identity, and intimacy.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of History.
"The Captive Maternal: Anti-Fascists in Search of the Beloved
Joy A. James // Williams College
Philosophy Colloquium Series
- October 2
- 3:00pm
- Clement Hall 317
Join the Philosophy Department for a lecture and discussion with Joy James, Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities at Williams College. Dr. James will share recent work on the concept of "The Captive Maternal," defined as a social function shaped under colonial conquest, chattel slavery, and an antiblack world. Her talk traces how coerced caretaking and sacrifice can mutate into refusal and resistance, moving from everyday compromise to protest to organized collective struggle, and, in some cases, to the creation and defense of autonomous ‘maroon’ zones. Centering agape as love understood as political will, the project argues that Black generative labor is routinely stolen and repurposed by state, corporate, and nonprofit power; and asks what it would mean to reclaim that power to build protective communities with real infrastructures of survival (housing, food, health, study, art, and security).
44th Annual Spindel Conference: "Conceptual Revisions"
- October 23-24
- 9:30-5:45
- UC Fountain View Room
- Convenient parking in the Zach Curlin Garage
From Plato to 21st century ‘conceptual engineers,’ from the Ancient Greek sophists to American pragmatists, philosophers have asked not only what our concepts actually do, but what they should do—should they track common sense, carve the world at the joints, eliminate confusion, unmask cultural pretensions, challenge entrenched power, advance social justice, or even serve as propaganda? Should our conceptual standards include only truth, or should they include, e.g., usefulness, economy, beauty, moral worth, political efficacy? Questions like these are as old as western philosophy, and they remain as urgent now as ever. This conference aims to create a dialogue on these questions with thinkers working across philosophy’s history.
For more details, click the above link for the conference's homepage.
"Truth After Post-Facts"
Zahid R. Chaudhary // Princeton University
Nasbeeb Shaheen Memorial Lecture
- Thursday, October 29
- Reception at 5:30 // Lecture at 6:00pm
- Maxine Smith University Center Fountain View Room
- Convenient parking in the Zach Curlin Garage
Zahid R. Chaudhary specializes in postcolonial studies, visual culture, and critical theory. His first book, Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India, provides a historical and philosophical account of early photography in India, analyzing how aesthetic experiments in colonial photographic practice shed light on the changing nature of perception and notions of truth, memory, and embodiment. His second book, Paranoid Publics: Psychopolitics of Truth (Fordham UP, 2025) is a psychosocial account of contemporary cultural politics, including conspiracy cultures, anti-democratic social movements, and new media networks. His third book (in progress), “Impunity: Notes on a Global Tendency,” analyzes juridical, economic, political, and aesthetic aspects of the practices of impunity from the Cold War to the present, from postcolonial states to the United States.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of English.
"AI vs. AI: Social Limits to Exponential Growth"
John Symons // University of Kansas
Philosophy Colloquium Series
- November 13
- 3:00pm
- Clement Hall 317
- Convenient Parking in Zach Curlin Garage
Join the Philosophy Department's Colloquium Series for a lecture and discussion with John Symons, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas. His current work is centered in philosophy of technology with ties to formal epistemology, philosophy of psychology, and metaphysics of emergence.
As Director of the Center for Cyber-Social Dynamics, Dr. Symons engages in the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study of the relationship between internet and data-driven technologies and society, politics, and culture in order to help our communities to mindfully and ethically shape technologies to promote human flourishing.