The Society of Fellows has selected Speakable/Unspeakable as the theme for the Spring 2025 edition of the Thursday Lecture Series.

Spring 2025 Thursday Lecture Series: Speakable/Unspeakable
Comment from the Fellows:

Thinking with Toni Morrison’s 1988 essay, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” we frame this year’s Society of Fellows Thursday Lecture Series around the theme, Speakable/Unspeakable. Humanistic studies have rendered speakable much of what has previously been unspoken, and this lecture series will examine what still remains virtually unspeakable. This framing considers both Speakable and Unspeakable as a dialectical pair in order to speak into existence what is otherwise unrepresentable, unwatchable, unreadable, unseeable: that which eludes description, writing, and narration. Unspeakable does not limit itself to what we are restricted from saying aloud or that which cannot be said within and outside the university but extends to knowledge itself. To render legible violence (physical, political, epistemic) and catastrophe, as Morrison describes, can provide “the stroke that announces something more than a secret shared, but a silence broken, a void filled, an unspeakable thing spoken at last.”

Speakable/Unspeakable is centrally about power and difference, what can be said, who can say it, where it can be said, and who, where, and what is worthy of being made speakable. But we also seek to historicize the formations that have dictated who, what, and which people, histories, and places have been erased and silenced when not left out altogether. Simultaneously, layers of shifting crises in a rapidly changing world tend to escape and obscure description. Making “speakable” requires methodological inventiveness in narration, thinking, and theoretical forms. It also requires challenging how historical formations and continued cultural, political, and material production have made crises unspeakable. Even if the unspeakable is made speakable, what are the ethics of doing so, with the recognition that simply “speaking” the truth cannot or will not be enough? With this lecture series, we invite our speakers to engage with making the unspeakable speakable while also considering whether it should be done.

Full Spring TLS Lineup
All events take place in the Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room. More information and registration coming soon.

February 6
Counter-Extremism in the University: On the Temporality of Care
Speaker: Niyousha Bastani, University of Cambridge
SOF Fellow: Eli Cumings

February 13
Alter-Being as Permanent Insurrection: Defining and Destroying the 21st Century Counterinsurgency Machine
Speaker: Dylan Rodríguez, University of California, Riverside
SOF Fellows: Chris Kelly

February 20
From Death Wishes to Disability Rights: Vulnerability, Unspeakability, and “The Question of Unworthy Life”
Speaker: Dagmar Herzog, CUNY Graduate Center
SOF Fellow: Zavier Nunn

February 27
Platform Entrepreneurs and Political Reconfiguration
Speaker: Moira Weigel, Harvard University
SOF Fellow: Irina Kalinka

March 6
Our Morals and Theirs: On the Lynching Film in Another America
Speaker: Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, University of Chicago
SOF Fellow: Anastasia Kostina

March 27
Caste Marking and Unmarking
Speaker: Ajantha Subramanian, CUNY Graduate Center
SOF Fellow: Sonali Dhanpal

April 10
“Imbrocháveis”: Christian Nationalism, Scandal, and Spectacularity in the Rise of Brazil’s Contemporary Right
Speaker: Ben Cowan, University of California, San Diego
SOF Fellow: Daniela Traldi

April 17
Beyond Silence: Towards a Black Feminist Anarchism
Speaker: Nathalie Batraville, Concordia University
SOF Fellow: A. Véronique Charles

April 24
Testimony of the Property: Armenian Displacement and the Post-Ottoman Architectural Worldmaking
Speaker: Aslihan Gunhan, Bilkent University
SOF Fellow: Maura Lucking