Scholar and cultural critic Rey Chow will deliver the Humanities Council’s second Spring 2025 Gauss Seminar in Criticism on April 22-23. Her two-day visit to Princeton, under the general title “Critique and Contemporary Global Geopolitics,” will include a public lecture and a lunch workshop.
Chow’s lecture, “Liberal Democracy versus Totalitarianism? Misleading Terms of the New Cold War,” will be held on Tuesday, April 22 at 5 pm in Betts Auditorium. The talk will examine the conventional polarization of the terms “liberal democracy” and “totalitarianism” and how this polarization has shaped the argumentative form and thrust of many Euro-American discussions about contemporary geopolitics. The lecture is open to the public.
Chow’s visit will continue on Wednesday, April 23 with a lunch seminar titled “Critique beyond the Euro-American World: Limits and Possibilities.” The seminar will examine several of Chow’s recent publications and explore the controversy of critique as a post-Enlightenment intellectual practice. RSVP is required for this discussion, which is open only to members of the University community.
Chow is the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Duke University. The author of over 120 publications, Chow’s research focuses on theoretical, interdisciplinary, and textual analyses. She specializes in studying cultural forms through language, image, and sound, as well as in the discursive encounters among modernity, postcoloniality, sexuality, and ethnicity.
Instituted in 1949 in honor of Dean Christian Gauss, the Gauss Seminars in Criticism provide a forum for discussion, study, and the exchange of ideas in the humanities.
Learn more about the Gauss Seminars in Criticism on the Humanities Council website.
