Wesson Discussion Seminar with Amia Srinivasan

The Wesson Discussion Seminar is intended to be a response to the Wesson Lecture delivered by Amia Srinivasan on Wednesday, April 13.

Amia Srinivasan is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford. Her academic work focuses on epistemology, political philosophy, the history and theory of feminism, and metaphilosophy. Her essays and criticism – on topics as diverse as sex, death, octopuses, anger, surfing and the politics of pronouns – have appeared in the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor, The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement and Harper's. Her book, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-first Century, is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Hybrid Event. In-person attendance is open to the general public. 

Discussion Seminar Commentators

Terry Castle, Walter H. Haas Professor in the Humanities, Emerita, Stanford University. Terry Castle has taught English literature at Stanford since 1983. She specializes in the history of the novel, especially the works of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Austen. But she has taught a wide variety of other subjects too:  the literature of the First World War, British modernism, Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, and other twentieth-century women writers, psychoanalytic theory, literature and opera, and gay and lesbian writing.

Mark Greif, Associate Professor of English and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature, Stanford University. Mark Greif’s scholarly work looks at the connections of literature to intellectual and cultural history, the popular arts, aesthetics and everyday ethics. He taught at the New School and Brown before coming to Stanford. He is the author of The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973 (Princeton, 2015), which received the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas, and the Susanne M. Glasscock Prize for interdisciplinary humanities scholarship. His book Against Everything: Essays (Pantheon, 2016) was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in Criticism. His current book concerns the history and aesthetics of pornography from the eighteenth century to the internet age.