Conversation in the Critical Humanities
The Kaplan Conversation in the Critical Humanities invites scholars to address timely topics of wide interest or urgency from a humanistic perspective.
FALL 2025
"TRANSLATION: OR IS IT CULTURAL APPROPRIATION?"
Souleymane Bachir Diagne
September 25, 2025 (Thurs.)
4:00 - 5:30 pm
Kresge Hall #2380
Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Professor Emeritus of French and Philosophy at Columbia, will discuss his new book, From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation.
"In my work in general, and in particular in my book From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation, I present translation as a humanism and a figure of what French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty has called a 'lateral universal.' In this lecture I address the objection that there is no genuine 'putting in touch' of languages (Antoine Berrman's phrase) or putting in touch of cultures through translation but mere cultural appropriation when translation happens for example, between cultures from 'the north' and cultures from the 'global south'."
Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a professor emeritus of French and Philosophy at Columbia University. His areas of research and publication include History of Philosophy, History of Logic and Mathematics, Islamic Philosophy, African Philosophy and Literature. His latest publications in English include: The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa (2016); Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with Western Tradition (2018); Postcolonial Bergson (2019); In Search of Africa(s): Universalism and Decolonial Thought (a dialogue with Jean-Loup Amselle, 2020); African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude (2023), and From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation (2025).
CONVERSATION WITH SUSAN STRYKER
November 10, 2025 (Mon.)
Time and location to be announced
Join us for a conversation with renowned gender theorist Susan Stryker.
Stryker’s historical research, theoretical writings, media-making, activism, and academic field-building activities have helped shape the conversation on trans issues since the early 1990s.
Past Events
Winter 2025
SOLIDARITY AND CIVIL RIGHTS: RACE, CASTE, AND NONVIOLENCE - A CONVERSATION WITH NICO SLATE
January 22, 2025 (Wed.)
4:00 - 5:30 pm
Harris Hall #108
Nico Slate, Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon, will be in conversation with Daniel Immerwahr (Professor of History) and Ivy Wilson (Associate Professor of English and Director, Black Arts Consortium).
For two hundred years, social reformers in the United States and India have compared race and caste. The majority of these reformers ignored what was lost in translating complex identities and hierarchies into the words “race” and “caste” and then again translating between these words. While exploring the limitations of such a double translation, this talk will explore how race/caste analogies were used to build intersectional solidarities that aimed to bridge movements against white supremacy, caste oppression, and other forms of injustice. Key figures will include W.E.B. Du Bois, B.R. Ambedkar, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Co-presented by the Kaplan Humanities Institute and the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies.
SPRING 2025
NICOLE FLEETWOOD - MARKING TIME: ART IN THE AGE OF MASS INCARCERATION
Thursday, April 17, 2025
5:30-7:00 pm
Harris Hall #108
Keynote of the 2025 Public Humanities Symposium
Nicole Fleetwood (James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU) will be in conversation with Marquis Bey (Professor of Black Studies, Northwestern). This public lecture by Professor Fleetwood is the keynote of the Kaplan Humanities Institute's two-day Public Humanities Symposium. Fleetwood is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020) and the curator of a MoMA PS1 exhibition of the same name. Both Fleetwood’s book and exhibition were named as a best book and a best show of the year, respectively, by the New York Times, The National Book Foundation, Smithsonian, and The New Yorker. Fleetwood is a recipient of a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship grant and many other awards and accolades besides.