Brown University Cogut Institute for the Humanities

The Cogut Institute for the Humanities presents a keynote talk, “‘The Defense of Society Has Been Betrayed’: Ensoulment and the Politics of History on the Far Right Today,” by scholar Leerom Medovoi (University of Arizona) for the conference “Race and Its Avatars: Literary Identity Politics from the Medieval to the Present.” Join us Thursday, May 7, 3:30 – 5 pm in the White Family Salon (Room 110) in Andrews House, 13 Brown St.

The explosive international growth of the Far Right in recent years has been buoyed by various forms of anti-immigrant and anti-elite racisms that lay claim on national history in the name of reviving its greatness. This talk explicates a strategy of power called “ensoulment” that animates these new modes of racialization. Ensoulment involves the exercise of knowledge/power over people by means of biopolitical processes that constitute them as a population against whom, as Michel Foucault once put it, “society must be defended.” The Far Right’s racial politics today, however, presuppose that the defense of society has always already been betrayed. They posit conspiratorial aims, long at the secret heart of national history, that act as a covert race war waged against its very life. In this way, the Far Right combines the historical discourse of race war and the modernizing discourse of biopower into a new kind of enemy-making politics.

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About the Author

Leerom Medovoi is Professor of English and Founding Chair of the Graduate Program in Social, Cultural and Critical Theory at the University of Arizona. He is the author of “Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity” (Duke University Press, 2005) and “The Inner Life of Race: Bodies, Souls, and the History of Racial Power” (Duke University Press, 2024). He publishes on biopolitical theory, critical race studies, and the environmental humanities. He was the PI on two Mellon grants with collaborative interdisciplinary research teams. The first grant explored religion and secularism’s changing relations to political life across the post-cold war globe. The second grant explored the neoliberal underpinnings of emergent far-right populist movements with focus on North America, Europe and South Asia. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley in 2021–22, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University in 2025–26.

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About the Conference

The conference “Race and Its Avatars: Literary Identity Politics from the Medieval to the Present” takes place May 7, 9:45 am – 5 pm, and features presentations from seven students in the spring 2026 ENGL 2762A seminar taught by Daniel Kim and Mariah Min. The seminar and conference are devoted to developing an understanding of “racism” as “a singular history” (Étienne Balibar), consisting of a number of racisms with “no fixed frontiers” that can cross-contaminate each other across wide expanses of time and space.

Read more about the conference: https://buff.ly/7LgKRKw

Literature

The Cogut Institute presents “Race and Its Avatars: Literary Identity Politics from the Medieval to the Present,” a conference featuring presentations from members of the spring 2026 seminar “Race and Its Avatars” (ENGL 2762A), taught by Daniel Kim and Mariah Min. Also included will be a keynote talk by scholar Leerom Medovoi (University of Arizona). Join us Thursday, May 7, 9:45 am – 5 pm on campus.

The seminar and conference are devoted to developing an understanding of “racism” as “a singular history” (Étienne Balibar), consisting of a number of racisms with “no fixed frontiers” that can cross-contaminate each other across wide expanses of time and space. We attend to the long history of this multivalent and multicombinant racism in two ways: by 1) studying pre-modern forms of collective hatred and fear that emerged prior to the putative stabilization of race as an identitarian category, and 2) exploring how to conceptualize relationally the various racial formations that emerged in modernity out of the slave trade, colonialism, and Na**sm.

Free and open to the public.

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Presenters

• Alexandra Gjaja (English)
• Chenxuan Hu (English)
• Melanie Kessinger (English)
• Tianren Luo (Comparative Literature)
• Grace Quast (English)
• Mina Quesen (English)
• Nishtha Trivedi (English)

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Keynote Talk

Scholar Leerom Medovoi (University of Arizona) will give the keynote talk, “‘The Defense of Society Has Been Betrayed’: Ensoulment and the Politics of History on the Far Right Today,” at 3:30 pm.

Read more about the keynote talk: https://buff.ly/7LgKRKw

Literature

Join us for the 2026 Collaborative Public Workshop May 2, 9 am – 6 pm, on campus. The event celebrates the work of eight Brown University Ph.D. candidates completing the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities and features presentations of their innovative and timely work.

Presenters and topics:

• Zeynep Aygun (Comparative Literature), “Psychoanalysis and Superstition”

• Jason Emmett Collins (English), “Our Epistemologies of Vision: Empiricism and Discernment in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa”

• Tessa Finley (Religious Studies), “The Iconoclasms of Attention: Iris Murdoch and Marion Milner”

• Amanda Macedo Macedo (Theatre Arts and Performance Studies), “Against Resolution: Temporal Disruption and the Politics of Witnessing”

• Michele Moghrabi (Comparative Literature), “(Once More) Toward a Theory of Socratic Elenchus”

• Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose (Modern Culture and Media), “Performing Return: Baartman, Funeral Rites, and the Fallacy of Homecoming”

• Monica Futong Ren (Modern Culture and Media), “Family Planning (1983) for the State: Population, Science Education Film, and Pedagogical Technology in China’s Reform Era”

• Armin Schneider (Integrative Studies), “Preliminaries II: Hic Rhodus, Providence, RI, 2026”

Sessions include commentaries from scholars Nadje Al-Ali (Brown University), Kenneth Haynes (Brown University), Tracy McNulty (Cornell University), and Paul North (Yale University), as well as a Q&A.

See the full schedule and read the presenters’ abstracts and bios: https://buff.ly/7pnBgew

Literature

Explore the Socratic method and superstition in psychoanalysis at the 2026 Collaborative Public Workshop in this pair of talks:

• Michele Moghrabi (Comparative Literature), “(Once More) Toward a Theory of Socratic Elenchus”

• Zeynep Aygun (Comparative Literature), “Psychoanalysis and Superstition”

The event celebrates the work of eight Brown University Ph.D. candidates completing the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities and features presentations of their innovative and timely work.

Join us May 2, 9 am – 6 pm on campus. See the full schedule and read the presenters’ abstracts and bios: https://buff.ly/7pnBgew

Join us at the 2026 Collaborative Public Workshop for these meditations on the role of literature in the history of thought:

• Armin Schneider (Integrative Studies), “Preliminaries II: Hic Rhodus, Providence, RI, 2026”

• Jason Emmett Collins (English), “Our Epistemologies of Vision: Empiricism and Discernment in Samuel Richardson’s ‘Clarissa’”

The event celebrates the work of eight Brown University Ph.D. candidates completing the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities and features presentations of their innovative and timely work.

Join us May 2, 9 am – 6 pm on campus. See the full schedule and read the presenters’ abstracts and bios: https://buff.ly/7pnBgew

Join us at the 2026 Collaborative Public Workshop for these explorations of the moral and political significance of art:

• Tessa Finley (Religious Studies), “The Iconoclasms of Attention: Iris Murdoch and Marion Milner”

• Amanda Macedo Macedo (Theatre Arts and Performance Studies), “Against Resolution: Temporal Disruption and the Politics of Witnessing”

The event celebrates the work of eight Brown University Ph.D. candidates completing the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities and features presentations of their innovative and timely work.

Join us May 2, 9 am – 6 pm on campus. See the full schedule and read the presenters’ abstracts and bios: https://buff.ly/7pnBgew