Join us on Zoom for a roundtable discussion in which Amir Eshel, Stanford University, discuss his recent book Poetic Thinking Today with Paul Kottman, The New School for Social Research, Alberto Siani, University of Pisa, and Daniella Jancsó, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich Germany.

Amir Eshel is Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies. He is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature and as of 2019 Director of Comparative Literature and its graduate program. His Stanford affiliations include The Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Modern Thought & Literature, and The Europe Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also the faculty director of Stanford’s research group on The Contemporary and of the Poetic Media Lab at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). His research focuses on contemporary literature and the arts as they touch on philosophy, specifically on memory, history, political thought, and ethics.

Alberto Siani received his BA degree in Philosophy in 2004 and his MA degree in Philosophy in 2006. He received his PhD in 2010. From 2011 to 2013 he was a post-doc Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, where he worked on a project on Hegel’s idea of modernity and offered courses as a temporary lecturer. From 2013 to 2016 he worked at Yeditepe University Istanbul first as an Assistant Professor and then as an Associate Professor. In October 2014 he received the Title (“Abilitazione” of Associate Professor in Italy for the areas of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Language. From September 2016 to August 2019 he was a Senior Researcher in Aesthetics at the Department of Civilizations and Forms of Knowledge of Università di Pisa, where since September 2019 he is an Associate Professor of Aesthetics.

Daniella Jancsó is Associate Professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. She studied English literature and linguistics at the University of Budapest and medicine at the University of Szeged, Hungary. She completed her doctorate (2006) and Habilitation (2016) at the University of Munich. She has published in the fields of early modern drama, Modernism, and contemporary literature; her most recent book is Twentieth-Century Metapoetry and the Lyric Tradition (de Gruyter, Berlin, 2019). Her current project is tentatively titled "The Poetics of Reconciliation". Drawing on Jonathan Culler's lyric theory as well as on established models of rapprochement and resolution developed in peacebuilding scholarship and trauma studies, the project aims to clarify the genre-specific contribution of the lyric to cope with collective trauma and to facilitate reconnection and recovery in the aftermath of political violence.

Paul Kottman is Professor of Comparative Literature at the New School for Social Research, and Eugene Lang College, the New School for Liberal Arts. He is a member of the Committee on Liberal Studies, and is affiliated with the Philosophy Department. He holds the Abilitazione, Professore Ordinario in Filosofia, Estetica (Professor of Philosophy, Aesthetics) in Italy. He has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Tokyo; the Università degli studi di Verona; Instituto per gli studi filosofici, Naples; Fudan University, Shanghai; and the International Chair in Political Languages, Dipartimento di Politiche Pubbliche e Scelte Colletive (POLIS), Università del Piemonte Orientale. He has been awarded residential fellowships at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (Institute for Research in the Humanities) and Internationales Kolleg Morphomata, Universität zu Köln.