Professorial Fellows

The Institute for the Humanities has appointed Professors Etienne Balibar and Sander Gilman to Professorial Fellowships for a 5-year period. Etienne and Sander participate directly in the activities of the Institute, the Faculty and more widely across the College. Please consult our Events page for further information.

Etienne Balibar is Professorial Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Emeritus Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the University of Paris 10 Nanterre and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine (USA). Etienne Balibar also teaches seminars at the Centro Franco-Argentino de Altos Estudios de la Universidad de Buenos-Aires (Argentina) and the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University of New-York. He is author or co-author of numerous books including Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser) (1965), On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1976), Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities (Verso, 1991, with Immanuel Wallerstein), Masses, Classes, Ideas (Routledge, 1994), The Philosophy of Marx (Verso 1995), Spinoza and Politics (Verso 1998), Politics and the Other Scene (Verso, 2002), We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, 2004). He is also a contributor of the Dictionnaire Européen des Philosophies (sous la direction de Barbara Cassin, 2004). Forthcoming are Extreme Violence and the Problem of Civility (The Wellek Library Lectures 1996), and Citoyen Sujet, Essais d'anthropologie philosophique (Presses Universitaires de France). Etienne Balibar is a member of Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (Paris), with a particular interest in the rights of migrants and asylum seekers. He is co-founder of Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace and acting chair of Association Jan Hus France.

Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished social and cultural historian, specializing amongst many areas in the history of science, psychoanalysis, Jewish Studies, German Studies and literary history. Sander is currently the Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences at the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, Emory University, where he is the Director of the Program in Psychoanalysis and of the Health Sciences Humanities Initiative. He has taught at Cornell University, University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Professor Gilman has held many prestigious visiting Professorships and Fellowships in Universities all over the world. His many publications include Multiculturalism and the Jews (2006); Franz Kafka (2005); Fat Boys: A Slim Book (2004); Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories, and Identities (2004); The Fortunes of the Humanities: Teaching the Humanities in the New Millennium (2000); Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (1999); Freud, Race, and Gender (1993); The Jew’s Body (1991). Sander has edited some 40 books and special issues of journals and he is on the editorial board of many book series. As a Professorial Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Professor Gilman will be leading initiatives in the interface between the humanities and the sciences.