François Hartog - "Chronos: The West Confronts Time"

François Hartog will discuss Chronos: The West Confronts Time. He will be joined in conversation by Nitzan Lebovic, Sarah Nooter and 3CT fellow Bill Brown. 3CT fellow Dipesh Chakrabarty will moderate.

Presented in partnership with 3CT's New Book Salon

This is an in-person event and will be held at the Department of Classics, Room 110. Masks are encouraged but not required.

About the book: As omnipresent as it is ungraspable, time has always inspired and eluded attempts to comprehend it. For the early Christians, for the twenty-first-century world, how have past and future been woven into the present? In Chronos, a leading French historian ranges from Western antiquity to the Anthropocene, pinpointing the crucial turning points in our relationship to time.

About the author: François Hartog is a professor emeritus at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. His books in English include Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time (Columbia, 2015) and The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History (1988).

About the interlocutors: Bill Brown is the Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture at University of Chicago, appointed in the Department of English and the Department of Visual Arts. He is also a faculty fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT). Brown has been a co-editor of Critical Inquiry since 1993. Working at the intersection of literary, visual, and material cultures, he has developed such concepts as “misuse value,” the “materiality effect,” and “redemptive reification” in the effort to apprehend the embeddedness of the human within various object worlds. He is the author of The Material Unconscious (1997), A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2004), and Other Things (2015), and of essays that explore such topics as “thing theory,” “textual materialism,” and the “obsolescence of the human.” His current project on “Re-Assemblage” asks how the history of assemblage practice in the arts might contribute to the assemblage theory deployed within the social sciences.

Nitzan Lebovic is currently Joyce Z. Greenberg Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago's Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies and professor of History and the Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values at Lehigh University. Lebovic received his BA in History and Theory of Literature from Tel Aviv University and his PhD from UCLA. He has published two single-authored books, co-edited two collections of essays, and edited a number of special issues dedicated to topics such as nihilism, political theology, complicity, and dissent. Lebovic is preparing to submit his third monograph, A German-Jewish Time.

Sarah Nooter is Professor in the Departments of Classics and Theater and Performance Studies and the College. She writes about Greek drama and modern reception, and also about poetry, the voice, embodiment, and performance. Her books include Greek Poetry in the Age of Ephemerality (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2023), The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2012). She is also working on a volume called How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality (under review with Princeton University Press), and continues to work on an ongoing project on modern African drama and ancient Greek tragedy. Nooter has also served as Editor-in-Chief of Classical Philology, where she has edited special issues on Poetry and Its Means, Athens: Stage, Page, Assembly, and Tragedy: Reconstruction and Repair.

About the moderator: Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Prize, which is given to a distinguished practitioner of global history.