Previous PLS Topics and Guests

2007: "Challenging the Logics of the Empire "

• Diana Taylor [PDF], "Double Blind: The Torture Case"
• Gayatri Gopinath [PDF], "Queer Regions: From Fire to The Journey "
• T.J. jackson Lears [PDF], "American Empire"

2006: "Open Secrets, Tolerated Illegalities, Ethical Refusals"

• Kamala Kempadoo, "Transacting Sex in the Carribean: Migration, Work, and Human Trafficking"
• Francine Masiello, "Reading for the People"
• Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, "Strolling the Herrengasse: Street Photographs in Archival and Personal Memory"
• Dwight McBride, "Race, Faith, and Sexuality: Or a Snapshot Genealogy of the Grateful Negro"

2005: "Re/Locating Knowledge: Temporal, Legal, Ethical, Spatial"

• Jill Dolan, "Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre "
• Kembrew McLeod, "Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity"
• Roderick Ferguson , "The Stratifications of Normativity: Race, Governmentality, and Minority Formations"
• Aihwa Ong, "Neoliberalism, or the Shifting Ground of Politics and Ethics"

2004: "American Landscapes: Power, Spectacle and the Public Sphere"

• Eric Lott, "The First Boomer: Bill Clinton, George W., and Fictions of State"
• Shannon Jackson, "Racial Performativity and Anti-Racist Performance"
• Judith Halberstam, "Dude, Where's My Gender?"
• Phil Auslander, "'I Wanna Be Your Man': Suzi Quatro's Musical Androgyny"

2002: "Collaborations Across Disciplines"

• Lydia Liu, "Women and Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century"
• Janice Radway, "Girls, Zines, and the Miscellaneous Production of Subjectivity in an Age of Unceasing Circulation"
• Martin Manalansan IV, "Migrancy, Mobility, and Modernity: Traversing Queer Diasporic Intimacies"
• Lee Edelman, "Compassion's Compulsion: Queer Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Hitchcock's North by Northwest"
• William Julius Wilson, "Welfare, Children, and Families: The Impact of Welfare in a Time of Recession"

2001: "Global Anthropologies"

• Jacqueline Nassy Brown, "From Global to Local and Back Again: Placing Black Identities in Liverpool, England"
• Anna Anagnost, "Is the Fatherland Really a Motherland?"
• David Roman, "Latino Genealogies: Broadway and Beyond"

2000: "Policy, Inequality, and Social Memory"

• David Roediger, "The Art of Whiteness: Giuliani, Racial Politics, and the Brooklyn Museum"
• Donna Guy, "Women and Children Crossing the Border"
• Rey Chow, "When Whiteness Feminizes: The Rise of 'Woman' in the Age of Multiculturalism"
• Augusto Boal, "Legislative Theatre: Using Performance to Make Politics"
• George Lipsitz, "Citizenship, Democracy, and Public Policy in the 21st Century"

1999: "Citizenship and Diaspora"

• Pheng Cheah, "Diaspora, Chinese Cosmopolitanism, and Postcolonial National Memory"
• Robbie McCauley , "Regenerating Cultural Presence: Tuning In Through Performance"
• Lauren Berlant, "Citizenship and Sentimentality: The Politics of True Feeling"

1998: "Performance and Cultural Politics"

• Peter McLaren, "Unthinking Whiteness: Towards a Revolutionary Multiculturalism"
• Peggy Phelan, "Performance and Politics: Ronald Reagan and Death in America"
• Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes, "Lecture Demonstration: Ethno-Cyborgs and Artificial Savages" and "Mexterminator: An Interactive Diorama Performance"

1997: "Border Crossings: Conversations across Disciplines and Cultures"

• Coco Fusco, "Performance and the Power of the Popular: Cultural Fusion in the Americas"
• Barbara Harlow, "Cultural Struggles in Narrative: Human Rights Reporting Truth and Commissions"
• Michael Awkward, "Identity and Cultural Criticism: The Role of the Black Public Intellectual"