News & Events
Workshop and Graduate Seminar on
Michael Rosen’s The Shadow of God
Nietzsche once remarked that, even though God is dead, his shadow will continue to appear for millennia to come. Taking up this suggestion, Michael Rosen’s (Harvard) bold new book, The Shadow of God, explores secular modernity’s theistic inheritance. Masterfully blending intellectual history and philosophy, Rosen argues that many of what are usually considered to be secular ideas were in fact profoundly shaped by religion.
Professor Rosen is coming to Cambridge on the 2nd of June 2023 to take part in two events:
1. A workshop on The Shadow of God. Speakers beside Michael Rosen include Rae Langton (Philosophy, Cambridge) and Richard Bourke (History, Cambridge), as well as Charles Turner (Sociology, Warwick) and Daniel Chernilo (Sociology, University Adolfo Ibañez). There will be a wine reception following the event.
The workshop will take place on June 2nd between 4-6 PM.
Location: Chadwick Room, Selwyn College.
Please register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/workshop-on-michael-rosens-the-shadow-of-god-tickets-583888565417
2. A graduate seminar where students get the opportunity to ask Professor Rosen questions about his entire intellectual oeuvre, including, but not limited to, The Shadow of God. All graduate (both MPhil and PhD) students from across the humanities and social sciences are welcome.
The graduate seminar will be between 11-12:30 on June 2nd.
Location: Chadwick Room, Selwyn College. Please write to Marijn and Sebastian (contact details below) and tell us a bit about your research and why the seminar might be of interest to you.
Should you have any questions, please contact either mjn51@cam.ac.uk or slr75@cam.ac.uk.
We look forward to seeing many of you there,
Sebastian Raza-Mejia & Marijn Nohlmans.
DECOLONISING SOCIAL THEORY LECTURE SERIES
Organised by the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, in conjunction with the Department of Sociology of the University of Cambridge, the Decolonising Social Theory Lecture series provides a unique forum for distinguished scholars of international reputation to address, in an accessible manner, topics of broad interest to the sociological community, particularly those dealing with empires and colonialism.
Our first guest was Julian Go (UofC), who talked about "Anticolonial Thought and the Sociological Imagination".
The Verstehen Colloquium began, informally, with a reading group on Dilthey’s The formation of the historical world in the human sciences in the summer of 2019. This reading group brought together a group of people interested in trying to recover, principally from the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions, ways of thinking about the nature of knowledge of human behaviour and systems which have perhaps become obscure. Brought together as the Verstehen Colloquium, this group now meets frequently during and outside term-time both to discuss readings of shared interest, and also to provide sessions for participants to sound out their own work making efforts on this direction.
Thursday, November 10 2022:
Sharing the Emperor’s New Clothes: Charisma and Imitation in the Case of Volodymyr Zelensky Paul Joosse and Dominik ZelinskiMoving beyond prevalent frameworks of charisma scholarship which highlight antagonism between charismatic leaders and non-charismatic elites, this paper proposes a theory of charismatic ‘soft power’ as a form of cultural influence. We combine contemporary cultural sociology of charisma with Girard’s notion of mimesis to argue that, rather than being in a permanent state of conflict with the charismatic leader, non-charismatic elites often seek to align themselves with the new sources of legitimacy being developed by the charismatic leader, co-opting these new leadership protocols into their own vocabularies of leadership. We demonstrate the usefulness of our model for interpreting the case of the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and his encounters with European leaders.
"Sharing the Emperor's new clothes" talk
New Cambridge PhD awarded: to Abdullah Awad, with the dissertation "Adorno, Aesthetics, and Critical Theory Beyond Europe." (08/12/2022). Supervisor: Filipe Carreira da Silva. Examiners: Peter E. Gordon and Patrick Baert.
The Ambedkar Reading Group at Cambridge (ARC) at the University of Cambridge is an initiative led by Kumud Ranjan, visiting scholar and Priyanka Kotamraju, PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology. It is open to staff and students of the University of Cambridge.
Next meeting:
Locating Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development
Thursday 9th March 2023 14:00 - 16:00 (online)
