Speakers
T. J. Clark is the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for many years. He is the author of books including The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848-1851 (1973), Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (1973), The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (1984), Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999); Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (written with “Retort,” 2005), The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006), Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (2013), and Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come (2018). His latest book, If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present, will appear in September.
Jeff Dolven is Professor of English at Princeton University. He has written three books of criticism, Scenes of Instruction (2007), Senses of Style (2018), as well as essays on a variety of subjects, including Renaissance metrics, Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare’s reading, Fairfield Porter, and player pianos. His poems have appeared in magazines and journals in the US and the UK and in a volume, Sarabande (2013).
Nicholas Gaskill is Associate Professor of English at Oxford, and a Fellow of Oriel College. He is the author of Chromographia (2019) 'and is writing a book on pragmatism and aesthetic education.
Jeremy Melius is a historian of modern art and art writing. He has recently completed a book on the invention of Botticelli and is at work on another concerning the fraught relation between John Ruskin and art history.
Kathryn Murphy is Associate Professor of English at Oxford, and a Fellow of Oriel College. She is the author of The Tottering Universal (forthcoming) and editor, with Thomas Karshan, of On Essays: Montaigne to the Present (2021).
Adam Phillips is a practicing psychoanalyst and a visiting professor of English at the University of York. He has been a regular writer for The London Review of Books, the Observer, and the New York Times for many years, and is the author of books, including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (1994), On Flirtation (1995), The Beast in the Nursery (1998), Darwin’s Worms (1999), Houdini’s Box (2001), Going Sane (2005), Side Effects (2006), On Balance (2010), Missing Out (2012), Becoming Freud (2014), Unforbidden Pleasures (2015), Attention Seeking (2019) and On Getting Better (2021).
David Russell is Associate Professor of English at Oxford, and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. He is the author of Tact (2018) and is writing a book on John Ruskin and a book on Marion Milner.
Elisa Tamarkin is Professor of English at UC Berkeley, and writes about American literature as well as topics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual history, philosophy, and art. She is the author of Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (2008). Her new book, Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press in Spring 2022.
Mia You's first full-length collection is I, Too, Dislike It (2016). You’s poems also have appeared as a chapbook, Objective Practice (2007), and an artist’s book, YOU (2004). She currently teaches creative writing and literature at the Universiteit Utrecht, after completing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes essays and book reviews and has published them with Artforum, Bookforum, The Critical Flame, The Hairpin, Jacket2, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She was recently awarded a Dutch Research Council grant for a three-year project on ‘Poetry in the Age of Global English.’
