Offering an intellectual history of the phases of Marx’s thought from his dissertation on Greek philosophy to The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Gopal Balakrishnan seeks to explain why the emergent syntheses of this early Marx broke down in the aftermath of the failures of the revolutions of 1848.

Gopal Balakrishnan is Professor of History of Consciousness at UCSC.

Warren Montag’s research has two foci: French and Italian thought of the 1960s and 1970s, especially Althusser; and Literature and Philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. His recent book concerns the emergence of a necro-economics from French economic thinkers to Adam Smith (and beyond, from Malthus to Von Mises).

Warren Montag is Brown Family Professor of Literature, English Department at Occidental College.

Rebecca Karl’s current work includes a forthcoming book entitled The Magic of Concepts: Philosophy and the Economic in Twentieth Century China; this book examines the intersections between philosophical and economic questions as they emerge and re-emerge over the course of China’s twentieth century. Ongoing work includes a project on histories of economic concepts in China tentatively entitled, Worlds of Chinese Economic Thought

Rebecca Karl is Professor of Chinese History at New York University.

Mayanthi Fernando works on religion, politics, and the secular. Her first book on the Islamic revival and French secularity will be out in 2014. Her new project examines the nexus of sex, religion, and secularism, and in particular the French state’s regulation of Muslim women’s sexual and religious intimacies.

Mayanthi Fernando is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz

Aristea Fotopoulou works at the intersections of media & cultural studies with science & technologies studies. She has written on digital networks and feminism, information politics, knowledge production, and digital engagement. She currently explores algorithmic living and practices of data sharing.

Aristea Fotopoulou is Research Fellow, University of Sussex, UK; and 2014 Visiting Scholar at the Science and Justice Research Center, UC Santa Cruz.

Gildas Hamel’s current work is on the economy, society and religion of ancient Israel and Graeco-Roman Judaea. His research focuses on taxes, forms of labor, the competition of various groups for resources and political power, and the evolution of religious structures, including the appearance of monotheism and new notions of time.

Gildas Hamel is Senior Lecturer Emeritus in the History Department.

Warren Sack is currently working on a book entitled “The Software Arts” (for the Software Studies series at MIT Press) where he explores an understanding of computer science as a liberal art and computer programming as a form of writing.

Matthew Wolf-Meyer’s work focuses on medicine, science and media in the United States. He is currently finishing a book manuscript, tentatively titled What Matters: Autism, Neuroscience and the Politics of American Brains, on the alternative histories of American neuroscience, seen through the lens of extreme anti-social forms of autism.

This talk was originally scheduled for March 5th. It has been rescheduled to take place on March 12th.

Karen Bassi’s current  book project, In Search of Lost Things: Classics Between History and Archaeology is a study of visual perception as the source of knowledge about the past in ancient Greek epic, history writing, and drama. The book explores the dominance of vision and visual metaphors in making truth claims, the role of language in distinguishing fiction from fact, and the criteria for establishing the reality of the past.