Andrew Cole, Professor of English and Director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism, delivered the Clark Lectures 2019 at Trinity College, Cambridge University, U.K., from January 28 to February 6.
The multi-day program consisted of lectures and seminars under the general title “Unmodernism” and included the topics, “Hegel in the Cathedral,” “The Substance of Thought,” “The Forms of Theory,” and “Marx after Feudalism.”
The Clark Lectures on English literature have taken place at Cambridge since 1888 and have featured such speakers as T. S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, F. R. Leavis, William Empson, Geoffrey Hartman, Richard Rorty, Jerome McGann, Barbara Everett, John Hollander, Adrienne Rich, Seamus Heaney, Elaine Scarry, Quentin Skinner, Alice Oswald, as well as Princeton University’s Toni Morrison, Peter Brown, Susan Wolfson, and Paul Muldoon.
On his invitation to be the 2019 speaker, Cole said, “I’m delighted to be delivering these prestigious lectures at Trinity College. There’s apparently great interest at Trinity, as elsewhere, in studying English literature within longer intellectual histories that include philosophical works, as I’m attempting to do here in a discussion of thinkers ranging from Aristotle, Bartholomeus Anglicus, Julian of Norwich, William Langland to Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Marx.”
In a conversation with Trinity Fellows, Dr. Ross Wilson and Dr. Phil Knox, Cole further explained how literature and philosophy are inextricably connected in his teaching and research. Read the conversation here.
Cole will be hosting poet and scholar Fred Moten at the Spring 2019 Gauss Seminars in Criticism later in the month.
