05/19/2026
On Saturday, May 23, Cal Poly Philosophy will be hosting the following workshop: Entangled Depictions; Ethics and Aesthetics at the Intersection of Vulnerability, Intimacy, and Representation.
Helena de Bres, Amy Kurzweil, and Steven Ruszczycky will be joining us to discuss their work.
Helena de Bres is a professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College and a creative writer. Her forthcoming book, Philosophy in the First Person considers how we can reintroduce the elements of emotion, humor, narrative, and style to academic writing, encouraging us to write what she calls “philosophical personal essays.”
Amy Kurzweil is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of two graphic memoirs: Artificial: A Love Story (2023) and Flying Couch (2016) that explore memory, history, identity, and technologies of representation. Her current project, Graphic Memory, is a hybrid-book of craft and theory that considers how first-person comics represent others.
Steven Ruszczycky is an associate professor in the department of English and a member of the teaching faculty in the Women’s, Gender & Q***r Studies department at Cal Poly. His current project puts LGBTQ romance into conversation with accounts of gay s*x work in order to consider how forms of transactional s*x and intimacy function as sites for producing meaning.
If this workshop is of interest to you, reach out to Professor Daniel Story ([email protected]) for location and pre-reading details.
