This lecture dialogue between Deborah Cowen, Associate Professor of Geography, University of Toronto, and Brian Holmes, internationally known art critic and philosopher, is the second in a year-long series of events titled Globalizing the Human. The series will invite colleagues from the humanities and social sciences (and cognate professional schools) to jointly explore questions that highlight the urgency of thinking globally about the humanities and humanistically about globalization.

Deborah Cowen has written extensively on militarism, violence, and security, cities and social justice, and geographies of citizenship and labor.  Her most recent book is The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. Brian Holmes is a key contributor to Southwest Corridor Northwest Passage, a project on supply chains by Midwest artists/activists, and in 2014 co-organized a series of events in Chicago under the title, Foreign Trade Zones: A People’s Consultancy.  His books include Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society.

This is the second event in a year-long seminar that will invite colleagues from the humanities and social sciences (and cognate professional schools) to jointly explore questions that highlight the urgency of thinking globally about the humanities and humanistically about globalization. What can the study of human geography contribute to our ability to comprehend the origins and movement of artistic and literary creations? What parallels exist between the fraught identity politics of systematic wartime rape as a tool of genocide by procreation and the modes of cultural production employed by colonizing powers in erasing or overwriting the artistic and cultural achievements of colonized societies? Why do economic and political assessments of globalization vary so dramatically from those generated by critics within disciplines like literature and film studies?

This event is also sponsored by the Graduate Program for Cultural Studies, the Department of History of Art and Architecture, and the Department of Studio Arts at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Global Studies Major at Carnegie Mellon University. For more information, contact Michael Goodhart at goodhart@pitt.edu.