Programme of Events 2025-26

Join us this term for I’m Glad I Read It—an informal series where faculty from several departments will discuss a reading experience that they are glad to have had. See webpage for details of speakers and works to be discussed. For students and staff - all are welcome.

Join us this term for I’m Glad I Read It—an informal series where faculty from several departments will discuss a reading experience that they are glad to have had. See webpage for details of speakers and works to be discussed. For students and staff - all are welcome.

Join us this term for I’m Glad I Read It—an informal series where faculty from several departments will discuss a reading experience that they are glad to have had. See webpage for details of speakers and works to be discussed. For students and staff - all are welcome.

Join us this term for I’m Glad I Read It—an informal series where faculty from several departments will discuss a reading experience that they are glad to have had. See webpage for details of speakers and works to be discussed. For students and staff - all are welcome.

Friday 12 December, 14.00-17.00, A0.28 (Millburn) and on Teams

Join us to hear from an array of wonderful speakers including past UG and PG students, CRPLA leading lights Martin Warner, Michael Bell and Peter Larkin, and path-breaking Phil/Lit PhD alum Ole Martin Skilleås (Bergen).

This talk by IAS Visiting Fellow Mario Telò will explore neurodiversity in relation to psychoanalysis, and in particular Laplanche’s notion of “implantation.” It considers the court case of Aldo Braibanti, a gay Italian Marxist intellectual, obsessed with entomology, who was convicted of “grooming” (plagio) in the 60s and spent 6 years in jail, during which he wrote a version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (a play he chose because of the connection of this character’s name with entolomological classification). Not just Braibanti’s sexuality, but also his autism was targeted by the conviction verdict. The talk takes as a starting point Robert Kennedy’s recent statement that “autism destroys the family”—in which family equals the world—to interrogate the relation between worlding and cognition. It connects neurodiversity with a critique of a certain notion of the commons symbolized by ancient sentimental images of communities of bees and ants, using trophallaxis—a form of food implantation practiced by insects—as a model of non-neurotypical relationality. This talk brings together psychoanalysis, the history of psychiatry, Black art and critical theory, and Bataille’s theorization of formlessness to theorize cognitive unworlding through classical reception.