Speaker
Linda Zerilli, Charlese E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College, University of Chicago
Date
Fri May 1st 2026, 11:30am - 1:00pm
Location
Graham Stuart Lounge - Encina Hall West, Room 400
Abstract
Critical feminist memory studies oriented around action in the present require a politically engaged approach to the past—one that not only recovers silenced histories and collective memories but also actively challenges historical and present social and political structures that perpetuate forgetting and exclusion. Drawing on the work of Françoise Vergès and Walter Benjamin, this essay examines how feminists can go beyond recovering the forgotten, denied, or erased past to transform memory into a tool for collective resistance and world-making.
Biography
Linda Marie-Gelsomina Zerilli is the Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College. She was the 2010-16 Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, where she continues as a leading scholar and teacher in the field. Zerilli is the author of Signifying Woman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), A Democratic Theory of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), A Democratic Theory of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025), and articles on subjects ranging across feminist thought, the politics of language, aesthetics, democratic theory, and Continental philosophy. She has been a Fulbright Fellow, a two-time Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and a Stanford Humanities Center Fellow, and a Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences Fellow. Zerilli was awarded a 2025 Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2016, Professor Zerilli won the University faculty award for excellence in graduate teaching and mentoring. She has served on the executive committee of Political Theory and the advisory boards of The American Political Science Review, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Constellations, and Culture, Theory and Critique.The discussant for the paper will be Professor Cécile Alduy, Professor of French literature in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and Associated Scholar at Sciences Po-Paris. Dr. Alduy is a specialist of political discourse analysis, with a focus on far right and populist discourse and ideology. At Stanford, she teaches gender studies, cinema, and literature. She is a regular writer for Le Monde, Liberation, L’Obs, Politico, Foreign Affairs, The New Yorker, among others. Dr. Alduy contributes regularly to KQED, the BBC, EuroNews, NPR, CBS News, and all French media.
