Conversation: Sovereignty and Populism

Peter Gilgen is Associate Professor of German Studies and Director of the Institute for German Cultural Studies at Cornell University, and is a member of the Cornell University Graduate Field in Comparative Literature. Gilgen's recent work includes essays on beauty and posthumanist aesthetics, translation and the philosophy of history, the conditions of the contemporary university, and the urgency of literature. He is currently writing a book on the poetics of renowned contemporary writer and artist Oswald Eggers. Gilgen also regularly publishes creative nonfiction and poetry in German.

Leah Feldman is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. Leah Feldman works on empire, nationalism, and critical approaches to ethnicity, gender, and sexuality from the vantage point of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Her book On the Threshold of Eurasia: Orientalism and Revolutionary Aesthetics in the Caucasus (Cornell 2018) exposes how the idea of a revolutionary Eurasia informed the interplay between orientalist and anti-imperial discourses in Russian and Azeri poetry and prose. She is currently working on an anthology of anticolonial thought and a monograph titled Feeling Collapse.

Jason Frank is the John L. Senior Professor of Government at Cornell University, and his primary field is political theory. He writes about democratic theory, the history of popular sovereignty, American political thought, modern and contemporary political theory, populism, and political aesthetics. He is currently a co-director of the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought and a member of the editorial board of the American Political Science Review. Frank has published five books, most recently The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly (2021).

R. A. Judy is Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh and is a member of the boundary 2 Editorial Collective. His work spans the fields of comparative literature and cultural studies, as well as Arabic literature and Black studies. He is author of (Dis)forming the American Canon: The Vernacular of African Arabic American Slave Narrative (1992) and Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black (2020). He has published numerous essays on philosophy, contemporary Islamic philosophy, literary/cultural theory, music, and Arabic and American literatures.

Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowksy Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Notably, he is the author of Knowledge and Practical Interests (2007 American Philosophical Association book prize), How Propaganda Works (2016 PROSE Award for Philosophy from the Association of American Publishers), and How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018). He most recently coauthored The Politics of Language (2023) with David I. Beaver. Stanley writes about authoritarianism, propaganda, free speech, mass incarceration, and other topics for publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Boston Review.