Event

Please join us as four distinguished scholars - Herman Bennett, Ravit Reichman, Dorothy Roberts, and Caleb Smith - discuss ways in which violence is institutionalized, legitimized, and rendered permissible, including in attempts to manage harm. At the same time, we ask what it looks like to alter a violent form, habit, or system.

Symposium organized by the Mellon Graduate Fellows of the Penn Humanities Forum, University of Pennsylvania.

The Graduate Humanities Forum gratefully acknowledges the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

9:20-10:20am | Opening Roundtable: Positions on Violence

Herman Bennett
Professor of History, CUNY

Ravit Reichman
Associate Professor of English, Brown

Dorothy Roberts
George A. Weiss Professor of Law and Scoiology and inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, Penn

Caleb Smith
Professor of English and American Studies, Yale

10:30am-12:30pm | Panel 1

Slavery & Governance as Violence: Thinking through the Early Modern Legal Turn
Herman Bennett

Too Much Property
Ravit Reichman

1:30pm-3:30pm | Panel 2

Race and the Paradox of State Violence
Dorothy Roberts

Imprisonment Without Justice
Caleb Smith

3:45-4:45pm | Closing Roundtable: Reflections on Violence

Herman Bennett, Ravit Reichman, Dorothy Roberts, Caleb Smith, and symposium participants