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Join us for the next meeting of the German Studies Lecture Series, featuring a talk by Kate Bermingham.

Degraded Temporalities and Therapeutic Freedom
Arendt on Nostalgia, Cliche, Forgetting, and Oblivion

Through an analysis of Hannah Arendt's political theory, this lecture explores what it means to create and maintain boundaries between past, present, and future and argues that doing so is a practice of freedom. Nostalgia, cliché, forgetting, and oblivion degrade these boundaries, generating an experience of time akin to what some psychologists theorize as anxious and avoidant attachment styles. Part of a larger project that uses Arendt's concepts of time to apply her political theory to feminist philosophical accounts of trauma (and healing from trauma), the lecture will distinguish Arendt's theorization of time from Heidegger's, in addition to connecting her resistance to dialectics and romanticism to emerging critiques of therapy-speak in the post-COVID world.

Kate Bermingham is a feminist and political theorist and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Her expertise includes critical and democratic theory, reproductive justice, feminist critiques of the history of political thought, and the work of Hannah Arendt. Her scholarship has been published in New German Critique and HA, the Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, and she will present her in-progress manuscript “Plurality and Reality: Gaslighting, Epistemic Injustice, and Loss of the Common World” at the 2023 meeting of the Hannah Arendt Circle in late June. In addition to her research on Arendt, she is contributing an article to a special issue of the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy on sovereignty and constitutional interpretation in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. Dr. Bermingham holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in political science from the University of Notre Dame and a B.A. in government and English literature from Georgetown University.

Lunch will be provided. to ensure we have an accurate count.

Questions: Send an email to mdeniz [at] stanford.edu (mdeniz[at]stanford[dot]edu), dlclevents [at] stanford.edu (dlclevents[at]stanford[dot]edu)