Modern Europe Colloquium: “Bear Life / Bare Life: Bruno, Biopolitics, and Sovereignty in the Bavarian Alps”

Event time: 
Monday, October 27, 2025 - 4:00pm
Location: 
Humanities Quadrangle See map
320 York Street
New Haven, CT 06520
Event description: 

The Modern Europe Colloquium presents

Tracie Matysik, Professor of History, Fellow of the Bolton Professorship in Secular Studies, University of Texas at Austin:  

“Bear Life / Bare Life: Bruno, Biopolitics, and Sovereignty in the Bavarian Alps.”

Tracie Matysik works in the field of modern European intellectual history. She is the author of When Spinoza Met Marx: Experiments in Non-Humanist Activity (University of Chicago Press) and of Reforming the Moral Subject: Ethics and Sexuality in Central Europe, 1890-1930 (Cornell University Press), as well as co-editor of German Modernities from Wilhelm to Weimar: A Contest of Futures (Bloomsbury Press).

In addition, she has written articles on the histories of Spinozism, psychoanalysis, secularism, subjectivity, international activism, and sexuality. She is currently working on a book project on “bear life” and “bare life,” or a study of nonhuman animals and their role in formations of law, sovereignty, and biopolitics. In 2016 she became co-editor of the journal Modern Intellectual History. She is fellow of the Brian F. Bolton Professorship in Secular Studies.

 

Admission: 
Free
Open to: 
General Public