{"id":295950,"date":"2026-09-29T03:28:07","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T03:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/295950\/"},"modified":"2026-09-29T03:28:07","modified_gmt":"2026-09-29T03:28:07","slug":"kislak-center-hosts-symposium-in-honor-of-french-philosopher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/295950\/","title":{"rendered":"Kislak Center hosts symposium in honor of French philosopher"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Kislak Center recently hosted a two-day symposium celebrating the centennial of a French philosopher\u2019s birth.<\/p>\n

The Sept. 24-25 conference<\/a> was held at Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center in honor of Michel Foucault, and drew in researchers from across the country. The event was organized by Penn professors Daniele Lorenzini and Donovan Schaefer and marked the 50th anniversary of the philosopher\u2019s landmark publication of \u201cThe History of Sexuality, Volume 1.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lorenzini previously edited some of Foucault\u2019s posthumously published writings and is the author of \u201cThe Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFoucault is taught and used by so many people in so many departments in the humanities and social sciences,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cI saw this as a great opportunity to bring many people together from different departments at Penn.\u201d<\/p>\n

The symposium, titled \u201cThe Foucault Century,\u201d included a variety of events from speaker sessions to an exhibition in the Lea Library. It also hosted around 130 attendees \u2014 including undergraduate, graduate, and Ph.D. students, as well numerous professors and experts.<\/p>\n

The first day of the conference featured a public lecture from Rice University professor Niki Kasumi Clements, a session led by Lorenzini and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, and a screening of two films focused on the philosopher.<\/p>\n

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Clements\u2019 lecture, which Schaefer described as \u201cthe most unique thing that could have shown up at this conference,\u201d included some of Foucault\u2019s never-before-published documents.<\/p>\n

The second day featured three sessions led by philosophy and Foucault experts, a viewing of the exhibit, and a final reflective discussion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lorenzini expressed that he was \u201cmost surprised about how generative Foucault\u2019s thoughts still are\u201d \u2014\u00a0noting that none of the event speakers presented work that he had already read.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey all came up with new things and with new readings in ways that I feel contribute to the fact that Foucault remains very relevant for us,\u201d he added.\u00a0<\/p>\n

David Halperin, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, presented on different perspectives and conversations surrounding Foucault. He focused on his upcoming paper, which defends Foucault from criticisms made against him in a 1997 essay by queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s still somebody who\u2019s very important to me as a thinker and as an example of how to live a queer life,\u201d Halperin said in an interview. \u201cI learned a ton of stuff that I didn\u2019t know about him from a number of the papers so that was extremely stimulating and revealing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Emory University professor Lynne Huffer spoke about how Foucault\u2019s thoughts can shape how we view the present. She highlighted that political depictions of 1968 Wharton graduate Donald Trump reflect Foucault\u2019s concepts of grotesque power and the ancient Greek practice of \u201cparrhesia\u201d \u2014 which translates to \u201csaying everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFoucault is such a creative, imaginative, counter-intuitive thinker that he makes our present strange,\u201d Huffer said in an interview. \u201cWe think we know the present; we think that it\u2019s familiar, and he makes it unfamiliar. To me, that’s a really valuable thing because it makes us think differently.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lorenzini said that the turnout gave \u201cthe conference a completely different feel,\u201d expressing hope that students left with \u201cmany more ideas to go back and read Foucault with the insights and the ideas\u201d that they heard about.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI have a better sense of who is interested in Foucault \u2026 and maybe there\u2019s a way in which this can bring us to further events or bring together all of these people at Penn who are interested in his work, to have some synergies and some collaborations in the future,\u201d he concluded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Kislak Center recently hosted a two-day symposium celebrating the centennial of a French philosopher\u2019s birth. The Sept.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295951,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70],"class_list":["post-295950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295950\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}