Wednesday, October 21, 2026 4:30pm
Rosenwald 301

Please join the Social Thought Colloquium for a talk given by Visiting Professor Rainer Forst. Rainer Forst is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy and Director of the Research Center "Normative Orders" at Goethe University Frankfurt. He is also Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on questions of justice, democracy, and toleration as well as critical theory and practical reason in the Kantian tradition.

Monday, October 26, 2026 from 2:00-4:00pm
Rockefeller Chapel
5850 S. Woodlawn Ave.
Chicago IL, 60637

Please join Social Thought and the University community in remembering James M. Redfield, the Edward Olson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Classical Languages and Literatures, in the Committee on Social Thought, the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World, and the College. Learn more about Professor Redfield here.

Monday, November 2, 2026 at 12:00pm
Location TBA

 

Javier Auyero is the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Professor in Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. His main areas of research, writing, and teaching are urban marginality, political ethnography, and collective violence. His research has been funded by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

Monday, November 2, 2026 at 4:30pm
Location TBA

Monday, November 9, 2026 at 6pm
Foster 103

Join Dan Morgan for a night of film and discussion in Foster 103. Dan is Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies and the College and in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought.

Monday, November 16, 2026 at 12pm
Social Sciences Tea Room (SSRB 201)

Join Nobel Laureate James Robinson for a talk about the development of his research interests. James Robinson is University Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy, the Department of Political Science, and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought. An economist and political scientist, Robinson has conducted influential research in the field of political and economic development and the relationships between political power and institutions and prosperity.

Monday, March 1, 2027
Location TBA

 

Clare Carlisle grew up in Manchester, and studied philosophy (BA, MA and PhD) at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1995 to 2002. She was Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool before joining King’s in 2011.Professor Carlisle is the author of eight books, including philosophical biographies of Søren Kierkegaard and George Eliot, and the editor of George Eliot’s translation of Spinoza’s Ethics. In 2024 she gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of St Andrews. She is currently President of the British Society for Philosophy of Religion.

Thursday, April 15, 2027
Location TBA

 

David Scott teaches at Columbia University, New York, where he is the Ruth and William Lubic Professor in the Department of Anthropology. He is the author of seven books, Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropological Discourses on the Sinhala Yaktovil (Minnesota, 1994), Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, 1999), Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Duke, 2004), Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Duke, 2014), Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity (Duke, 2017), Irreparable Evil: An Essay in Moral and Reparatory History (Columbia, 2024), and (with Orlando Patterson), The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialogue (Polity, 2023), and co-editor of Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors (Stanford, 2007). He is currently at work on two book projects—the first is a biography of Stuart Hall; and the second is a reconsideration of the question of reparation and revolution through the work of Walter Rodney.