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Light in Darkness: The mystical philosophy of Jacob B枚hme

Free special guided tours of the exhibition.

This postgraduate session will include two short papers, followed by a discussion:

Matthew Allen: 'Haiti and the counter-tradition of creole linguistics'

The concept of creolization has proved enormously productive in theorizing the cultural, social and epistemological plurality of the Caribbean, offering the possibility of a non-essentialist 鈥榩oetics of Relation鈥�. Yet as a result of its conceptual origin in the nineteenth-century evolutionary master narrative, creolization theories have often masked an underlying essentialism. Research on creolization has historically focused on the linguistic or physiological 鈥榤arkers鈥� of difference; creole languages have been treated as deviations from the linear model of descent. This presentation will sketch the course that debates on creole took in early twentieth-century Haiti, focusing on the work of the country鈥檚 first female anthropologist, Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain. Comhaire-Sylvain鈥檚 study of Krey貌l dispensed with the linguistic family tree, offering a new 鈥榰niversalizing鈥� basis for the study of creole languages. As such her work represents a unique synthesis of an ongoing debate in Haitian intellectual circles between universalism and particularism, while at the same time suggesting comparison with critical currents in linguistics which arose in other countries.

Jane Sinnett-Smith: 'Translating Faith: textual, material, and bodily translations in the thirteenth-century Vie de seinte Foye'

In this paper I consider the ways in which medieval literature interweaves notions of textual translation with a broader sense of translation as a material, spatial, and bodily process. I take as my focus the medieval cult of Saint Foye, or Faith, and in particular the thirteenth-century version of her life produced by Simon of Walsingham in Anglo-Norman French. Translation in the Middle Ages takes on a specifically sacred significance, describing the movement of saintly relics. The translations undergone by Foye鈥檚 corpse after her death are central to both cult and text. I explore how the spatial and corporeal translations of the corpse generate intertwined creative responses in text, but also in architecture and objects. I argue that these artistic productions in turn provoke more sacred activity, and ultimately facilitate mediated forms of access to the saintly body.

Dr Dan-el Padilla Peralta is Assistant Professor of Classics at Princeton University, where he is affiliated with the university's Center for Human Values and Program in Latino Studies. His work situates the religious and cultural history of the Roman Republic in dialogue with anthropology, sociology, economics, and comparative and global histories of slavery. In this public lecture, he will focus on the complicity of modern histories of Roman republican culture in the (re)production of colonial and postcolonial configurations of race.

The lecture is generously funded by the IAS.

Harry Harootunian, Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies, New York University, and Max Palevsky Professor of History and Civilizations, Emeritus, University of Chicago, will give the 14th annual Edward Said Lecture. His talk is titled, 鈥溾�業n the Zone of Occult Instability鈥�: Some Reflections on Unevenness, Discordant Temporalities, and the Logic of History.鈥� Harootunian is a world-renowned historian of early modern and modern Japan, as well as a major theorist of Marxism and the philosophy of history. He is the author of eleven books, including Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, 2000), History鈥檚 Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice and the Question of the Everyday Life (Columbia, 2000), and, most recently, Marx after Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism (Columbia, 2015)