In Fall 2006, the Center for the Humanities will sponsor a semester-long course that will bring four distinguished scholars to campus as Distinguished Visiting Professors in the Humanities:

Carolyn Dean is Associate Dean of the Faculty and Professor of History at Brown University. She is the author of The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject (1992); Sexuality and Modern Western Culture (1996); The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France (2000), and The Fragility of Empathy After the Holocaust (2004). In 1996 she was named the Rhode Island Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement for Teaching; she is currently engaged in a study of the recent emergence of “victim’s culture” in the United States and Western Europe.

Shuen-fu Lin is Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. He specializes in Chinese poetry of the middle periods, especially shi and ci poetry, literary theory, and early Daoist philosophical literature, and he regularly teaches a course on “The Pursuit of Happiness in the Chinese Tradition.” His books include The Transformation of the Chinese Lyrical Tradition: Chiang K'uei and Southern Sung Tz'u Poetry (1978) and The Vitality of the Lyric Voice: Shih Poetry from the Late Han to the T'ang (1986) .

Jennifer Doyle is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and is co-editor of Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Duke University Press, 1996), as well as “New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture”, a special issue of the journal Signs (Spring 2006). She is currently at work on two books: Critical Tears, which explores the place of emotion in contemporary art, and Between Friends, which is about the participation of women in gay avant-garde cinema. She writes regularly on sexuality and visual culture, and has published essays on the artists like Franko B., Tracey Emin, David Wojnarowicz. She also recently published “Jo March’s Love Poems”, an essay on the lesbian erotics of the poetry written by the character Jo March in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (Nineteenth-Century Literature, 2005).

Claire Colebrook is Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She has published on continental philosophy, feminist theory, literary theory and Romanticism. Her books include New Literary Histories (1997), Ethics and Representation (1999), Gilles Deleuze (2002), Understanding Deleuze (2002), Irony in the Work of Philosophy (2002), Gender (2003) and Irony: The New Critical Idiom (2003). Her current research interests are the relationship between philosophy and literature, Romanticism and the influence of German Romanticism on literature in English, and she is writing a book on happiness and narrative theory.

Each of the four Distinguished Professors will be on campus for three weeks, during which time they will teach a module of a single four-credit upper-level interdisciplinary seminar in Fall 2005 open to juniors and seniors. For a brief description.