Today and tomorrow, CIDRAL will host a public lecture and Key Ideas seminar with Mark Payne. Mark is Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. These events will cover a wide range of material, and carry implications for contemporary thought.

2 April, 5pm, Samuel Alexander Lecture Theatre

Public Lecture: Mark Payne (Chicago), ‘Occupation and Mentation in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction’

3 April, 1pm, Room A215 Samuel Alexander Building

Key Ideas seminar: Theorizing Catastrophe

Mark Payne is Professor of Comparative Literature and Classics at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction (Cambridge University Press), The Animal Part (The University of Chicago Press), and Hontology (Zero Books), as well as articles on twentieth century poetry, environmental philosophy, weird fiction, and contemporary art.

His lecture, “Occupation and Mentation in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction,” looks at the relationship between daily life and worldview in post-apocalyptic fiction from antiquity to the present.

His seminar, “Theorizing Catastrophe,” looks at the figuration of apocalyptic freedom in theory, and its relationship to colonial accounts of marronage (Zerilli, Rousseau, Jünger, Schmitt). 

• Download preparatory readings for this seminar

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