Plenary Speakers

Joshua Clover
Joshua Clover is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. He specializes in 20th/21st century poetry and poetics, literature and social movements, Marxism, political economy and histories of capitalism, crisis theory and cultures of finance, with an interest in environment, feminism, and critical race studies.

He has two books of cultural theory (The Matrix and 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About) routed through film and popular music, respectively. His book Riot.Strike.Riot: the New Era of Uprisings, a theorization of riot as historical phenomenon which opens onto a revised history of capital accumulation, was published by Verso in 2016. He has contributed articles to journals from Representations to Critical Inquiry. Forthcoming work focuses on poetry and the transformation of the world-system. He has also published three books of poetry, most recently Red Epic; has been translated into a dozen languages; and has appeared in many anthologies, including the Norton Introduction to Literature.

Katerina Kolozova
Katerina Kolozova is director of the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities–Skopje, Macedonia, and professor of philosophy, gender studies, and sociological theory at the University American College–Skopje. Her recent books include Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism: Marx and Laruelle (Punctum Books, 2015) and The Cut of The Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2014). Previous books include The Lived Revolution: Solidarity with the Body in Pain as the New Political Universal (2010), The Real and “I”: On the Limit and the Self (2006), Conversations with Judith Butler: The Crisis of the Subject (with Judith Butler and Zarko Trajanovski, 2002), and The Death and the Greeks: On Tragic Concepts of Death from Antiquity to Modernity (2000).

Kolozova is the editor of several books in the fields of gender studies and feminist theory, her most recent being After the “Speculative Turn”: Realism, Philosophy, and Feminism (with Eileen A. Joy, 2016). She is also editor-in-chief of the journal “Identities”: Politics, Gender and Culture; and a member of the Non-Philosophical Society (ONPHI), of the Association of Institutions for Feminist Education and Research in Europe (AOIFE), and of the European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation (AtGender).

François Laruelle
Originator of the concept of non-philosophy, François Laruelle, formerly of Collège international de philosophie and Université Paris Nanterre, now directs the Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale, a group dedicated to furthering the cause of non-philosophy.

 

Ariana Reines
Poet, playwright, performance artist, and translator, Ariana Reines completed graduate work at both Columbia University and the European Graduate School, where she studied literature, performance, and philosophy. Her books of poetry include The Cow (2006), which won the Alberta Prize from Fence Books; Coeur de Lion (2007); and Mercury. Her poems have been anthologized in Against Expression (2011) and Gurlesque (2010). She has taught at Columbia University and the European Graduate School, and was the Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California-Berkeley in 2009, the youngest poet to ever hold that position.

Frank B. Wilderson III
Frank B. Wilderson III is professor of African American Studies and Drama, and director of the Culture & Theory PhD program, at the University of California, Irvine. A leading figure in Afro-Pessimism thought, his books include Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U. S. Antagonisms (Duke University Press, 2010); and Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (South End Press, 2008), which won The Eisner Prize for Creative Achievement of the Highest Order, The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award for Creative Nonfiction, and The National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. His scholarly and creative writing have been published in Social Identities, Social Justice, Les Temps Modernes, Konch Magazine, Callaloo, Obsidian II, Paris Transcontinental, and the Yardbird Press Anthology.

He has also worked as an institutional dramaturge for Lincoln Center Theater’s productions of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s Mule Bone and Mbongeni Ngema’s Township Fever; and as a creative dramaturge for the Market Theater in Johannesburg’s production of George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum. He is director of the film Reparations . . . Now (2005), a critical documentary that that captures the terror of unnamable loss shouldered by twenty-first-century descendants of slaves.