Wednesday April 7

4:15 p.m., Forum South Lounge, "Developing Human Capabilities: Freedom, Universality, and Civility" by Drucilla Cornell, Professor of Law, Political Science, Women's Studies, and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. Prior to beginning her academic life, Drucilla Cornell was a union organizer for a number of years, working for the UAW, the UE, and the IUE in California, New Jersey, and New York. She played a key role in organizing the conference on Deconstruction and Justice at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in 1989, 1990, and 1993. Professor Cornell was professor at the Cardozo School of Law from 1989 to 1994. From 1994-2001, she was professor of law at Rutgers-Newark Law School. She has written numerous articles on contemporary continental thought, critical theory, grassroots political and legal mobilization, jurisprudence, women's literature, feminism, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and political philosophy that have appeared in leading journals of law, women’s studies, comparative literature, and philosophy, and has authored seven books: Beyond Accomodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law (1991, new edition 1999), The Philosophy of the Limit (1992), Transformations: Recollective Imagination and Sexual Difference (1993), The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography, and Sexual Harrassment (1995), At the Heart of Freedom: Feminism, Sex, and Equality (1998), Just Cause: Freedom, Identity, and Rights (2000), Between Women and Generations: Legacies of Dignity (2002). Her work has been translated into French, German, Japanese, Serbo-Croation, Portuguese, and Spanish, and she has recently given papers and conducted seminars in South Africa, Japan, Serbia, and Macedonia. In March 2003, she will deliver the prestigious Ryle Lectures at Trent University in Canada. A produced playwright, productions of her plays The Dream Cure, Background Interference, and Lifeline have been performed in California, New York, Florida, and Ohio. Her dramatization of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake runs every year in Dublin, Ireland.

8:00 p.m., Forum South Lounge, "The University in the Eyes of Its Accountants" by Jeffrey Nealon, Professor of English, The Pennsylvania State University.   Professor Nealon served as Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Humanities at Grinnell College in Fall 2003, where he directed a Faculty Seminar on "Post-Postmodern: Globalization, Symbolic Capital, and Resistance," and taught an Advanced Special Topic course on "Language and Cultural Studies."  He received his B.A. in English and Philosophy from Marquette University in 1985, and his Ph.D. in English from Loyola University in 1991. He began teaching in the English Department at The Pennsylvania State University in 1992, currently serves as Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department, and also serves on the Board of the University’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities and as a member of the Social Thought Program. Nealon is the author of Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction (1993, 1996; selected as a Choice Magazine “Outstanding Academic Book”), and Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (1998), and the co-editor of Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique (2002). His most recent book, co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, The Theory Toolbox: Critical Concepts for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, was published in July 2003.


Thursday, April 8

11:00 a.m., Herrick Chapel, Scholars’ Convocation –  "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Globalization" by Doug Henwood, Editor and Publisher, Left Business Observer.  Convinced that the 1980s experiment with free-market economics was a financial and social disaster and that much "left" writing on economics was usually dry and dated, Henwood decided that there was room for a newsletter addressing both these deficiencies. He founded Left Business Observer in September 1986. Almost from the first issue, the newsletter was a critical success.  LBO covers economics and politics in the broadest sense. Recent and persisting obsessions include the meaning of Bushism; income distribution and poverty in the U.S. and elsewhere in the First World; the globalization of finance and production; the worldwide attack on pensions; the 1990s boom and its aftermath. Every issue includes a report on the world's financial markets and central banks.  Besides editing LBO, Henwood is a contributing editor of The Nation, and hosts a radio weekly program on WBAI (New York). His book Wall Street was published by Verso in June 1997. His social atlas of the U.S. (in the Pluto atlas series), The State of the USA, was published by Simon & Schuster in the fall of 1994. His latest effort, After the New Economy, appeared in October 2003 from The New Press.


4:15 p.m., Forum South Lounge, "Saturated with Choices: How Does It Feel to You?" by Evan Watkins, Department of English, University of California-Davis. Professor Evan Watkins joined the English Department at the University of California at Davis following many yeas at The Pennsylvania State University where he taught English and Women's Studies. He received his B.A. from the University of Kansas in English and Philosophy in 1968 and his Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa in 1972.  Professor Watkins specializes in literacy theory, composition theory, cultural, American and gender studies.  He is the author of The Critical Act: Criticism and Community (Yale University Press, 1978), Work Time: English Departments and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Stanford University Press, 1989), Throwaways: Work Culture and Consumer Education (Stanford University Press, 1993), and Everyday Exchanges:  Marketwork and Capitalist Common Sense (Stanford University Press, 1998), and is currently completing two works,  Class Degrees: Vocational Education, Work, and Class Formation in the United States (under contract with Stanford University Press) and an edited collection on Rhetoric, Gender, and Science.

Friday, April 9

4:15 Round Table: Drucilla Cornell, Evan Watkins, Doug Henwood, Jeffrey Nealon, plus three Grinnell faculty members.