The Time of our Lives: The TORCH PUP Lecture Series 2025: Lecture 3

The Time of our Lives: The TORCH PUP Lecture Series 2025: Lecture 3

A series of three lectures with Homi K. Bhabha the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard.

By TORCH

Date and time

Thursday, May 22 · 5 - 6pm GMT+1

Location

Lecture Theatre 2, St Cross Building, Manor Road, Oxford

St Cross Building Oxford OX1 3UL United Kingdom

About this event

  • Event lasts 1 hour

The Time of our Lives

Princeton University Press TORCH Lecture Series 2025

A series of three lectures with Homi K. Bhabha the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and chair of the Program in History and Literature at Harvard University.


What does it mean to live collectively in the afterlife of a catastrophe?

How do we frame the traumatic crises of the 21st century— life post-9/11, pandemics, ethno-nationalist autocracies, imperial invasions, border brutalities and refugee crises—in a vocabulary that encapsulates responsibility, accountability, agentic expression, and above all, the shifting registers of selfhood?

Through a series of three lectures The Time of our Life interrogates the public culture of ‘trauma’ in the current climate of inflammatory polarisation. Join Homi Bhabha as he deconstructs and reconfigures new schema for understanding the politics of identity, culture wars, and the on-going “war of wounds and words” that haunts the moral and political economy of the US, alongside anti-minoritarian racial or ethnic equivalents around the world.


The series consists of three lectures.

This is the booking link for the third and final lecture.

LECTURE 3:

THE ANXIOUS ACADEMY: AFTERLIFE, AFTERTHOUGHTS

Thursday 20 May, 5pm-6pm.

Confronting the afterlife: reimagining and reconstructing definitions of political existence and advocacy in the path forward.

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TORCH stimulates, supports and promotes research activity of the very highest quality that transcends disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and engages with wider audiences.