Fall 2023 Gauss Seminars to Explore Feminism and Body Politics with Silvia Federici

October 12, 2023

Silvia Federici, a longtime activist, teacher, and writer, will deliver the Humanities Council’s Fall 2023 Gauss Seminars in Criticism. Her two-day visit to Princeton University will include a public lecture and a lunch seminar under the general title “Rethinking, Remaking a Feminist Agenda.”

Federici’s opening lecture, titled “Feminism, Social Reproduction, and the Reconstruction of the Commons” will be held on Tuesday, October 24 at 5 p.m. in Betts Auditorium. The lecture will examine different ways in which feminist movements around the globe are imagining and constructing a post-capitalist world built on the principle of the “commons.”

During a lunch seminar titled “The Body as a Site of Resistance,” on Wednesday, October 25 at 12:00 p.m., Federici will discuss the significance of the feminist politicization of the body.  RSVP is required for this discussion, which is open only to members of the University community.

Federici, professor of political philosophy and international students, emerita, at Hofstra University was among the founders of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the Campaign for Wages For Housework in the US and abroad. She has also been active in the anti-globalization movement and the anti-death penalty movement. In the 1990s, Federici was a member of the journal “Radical Midnight Notes” and in 1991, after a period of teaching in Nigeria, she helped found the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, which for more than ten years documented the struggle of African students against the austerity programs imposed by the IMF and the World Bank.

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. Visit the Humanities Council website for more information about upcoming events.

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