Caroline Levine, David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University and author, most recently, of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Oxford UP, 2015).
Rachel Eisendrath, Assistant Professor of English and Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Barnard College and author of the forthcoming Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis (University of Chicago Press, 2018).
Jonathan Kramnick, Manyard Mack Professor of English at Yale University and author of the forthcoming Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and of recent articles on form and formalism in Critical Inquiry and Representations.
Joseph North, Assistant Professor of English at Yale University and author of Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Harvard UP, 2017).
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We will be discussing recent work by our guests on and in aesthetics and aesthetic theory, and asking about how their thinking about aesthetics may reflect on the state of the discipline, on recent methodological debates about formalism and close reading, and on the politics of culture, art, and sensibility.