It is our honor to announce our Special Guest Speaker, well-known cultural critic and theorist, Professor of Theory of Literature, filmmaker, and a founding director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Mieke Bal.

Mieke Bal, a cultural theorist and critic, is Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Professor (KNAW). She is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam. Her areas of interest range from biblical and classical antiquity to 17th century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism and migratory culture. Her many books include A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) and Narratology (2009). Mieke Bal is also a video-artist, her experimental documentaries on migration include A Thousand and One Days; Colony and the installation Nothing is Missing. Her work is exhibited internationally. Occasionally she acts as an independent curator.

Mieke's lecture will take place on Tuesday 23 March, Oudemanhuispoort C017, from 10.15-11.15. This event is free and open to the public.

We are proud to welcome this year's keynote speakers.

Frederik Tygstrup, University of Copenhagen
Sara Cohen, University of Liverpool
Brett Lashua, Leeds Metropolitan University
Costas Douzinas, University of London
Sarah Chinn, City University of New York

Frederik Tygstrup: "Space. On the Organisation of Spatial Experience"
Frederik Tygstrup is the director of the Copenhagen Doctoral School in Cultural Studies and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen. His primary specialization is in the history and theory of the European novel, and his work on the subject includes: Fictions of Experience: The European Novel 1615-1857 (1992), and In Search of the Real: Essays on the 20th Century Novel (2000). His present research interests focus on the intersections of artistic practices and other social practices, including urban aesthetics, the history of representations and experiences of space, literature and medicine, literature and geography, literature and politics. His recent articles include: "The Politics of Symbolic Forms" (2009), "The Blue Chair. A Literary Report on Dementia in America" (2009), and the forthcoming "Life and Forms in the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze" (2010).

Frederik's lecture will take place on Wednesday 24 March, Oudemanhuispoort C017, from 10.15-11.15. This event is free and open to the public.

Sara Cohen and Brett Lashua: "An Atlas of Musical Memories: Mapping Popular Music and Urban Change"
Sara Cohen is a Professor in the School of Music and Director of the Institute of Popular Music at the University of Liverpool. She holds a DPhil in Social Anthropology from Oxford University and has specialized in ethnographic and anthropological approaches to music research. Her most recent work has explored issues of space, place, landscape, movement, local identity and ethnicity, cultural policy and urban regeneration. Her published articles and book chapters cover various aspects of popular music culture, and she is author of Rock Culture in Liverpool (1991) and Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture (2007). She is currently completing a research project on music, the built environment, and urban change, which is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of its Landscape and Environment scheme.

Brett Lashua is a Lecturer in the Carnegie Faculty of Sport and Education (Social Science of Leisure, Sport and Culture) at Leeds Metropolitan University. He holds a PhD in Leisure Studies from the University of Alberta, Canada. From 2007 to 2009 he was Research Associate at the University of Liverpool's Institute of Popular Music where he worked with Sara Cohen on her AHRC-funded project "Popular Musicscapes and the Characterisation of the Urban Environment." His current research is concerned primarily with the ways that young people make sense of their lives through arts and cultural practices, such as popular music (especially hip-hop), as well as how young people are "made sense of" through particular representational and narrative strategies. Questions of social space, place and cultural geographies also run through his work.

Sara and Brett's lecture will take place on Tuesday 23 March, Oudemanhuispoort F201C, from 15.00-16.00. This event is free and open to the public.

Costas Douzinas: "Against (liberal) cosmopolitanism: theology, politics, humanity"
Costas Douzinas is Professor of Law, Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and Pro-Vice Chancellor at Birkbeck College, University of London. Educated in Athens, London and Strasbourg, Costas has taught at the Universities of Middlesex, Lancaster, Prague, Athens, Griffith, and Nanjing. He is a founding member of the Critical Legal Conference; co-founder of the Birkbeck Law School; managing editor of Law and Critique: The International Journal of Critical Legal Thought; managing director of the publishing house Birkbeck Law Press.

Costas has written extensively in legal and political philosophy, human rights, aesthetics and critical theory. His books include Postmodern Jurisprudence; Justice Miscarried; Law and Psychoanalysis; The End of Human Rights; Law and the Image; Critical Jurisprudence; Nomos and Aesthetics; Human Rights and Empire; and Adieu Derrida. Later this year his The Left and Rights and The Idea of Communism (co-edited with Slavoj Zizek) will be published. His work has been translated in ten languages.

Costas' lecture will take place on Wednesday 24 March, Oudemanhuispoort F001, from 14.45-15.45. This event is free and open to the public.

Sarah Chinn: "Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American Stage"
Sarah Chinn is the Director of The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the CUNY Graduate Center and Associate Professor in the English Department at Hunter College. She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Her work primarily explores questions of race, sexuality, and gender in U.S. literature and culture, particularly in the 19th century. She is the author of Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence (2000) and is currently working on two book-length projects: New Americans, New Identities: Immigration and the Invention of Adolescence in the United States 1880-1930, an investigation of the creation of the identity of "the adolescent" at the end of the nineteenth century, and Feeling Our Way: The Ethics of Lesbian Writing, which uses current explorations of subjectivity, ethics, sexual and gendered identities, and narrative theory to formulate a complex but distinctive theory of reading lesbian writing.

Sarah's lecture will take place on Monday 22 March, Oudemanhuispoort C217, from 14.45-15.45. This event is free and open to the public.

More information on the event schedule can be found on the workshop website: http://www.hum.uva.nl/articulations