FCCS Guest Speaker

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What: Lecture, Miltonic Sovereignty Now
Who: Dr. Feisal Mohamed
Where: FIP 204, UBCO Okanagan Campus
When: Monday, Sept. 26th, 3:30pm

The Department of Critical Studies in FCCS is pleased to host a lecture by Dr. Feisal Mohamed, Full Professor at The Graduate Centre of the City University of New York.

Dr. Feisal Mohamed is the author of several books and numerous publications on sovereignty, terrorism, and human rights from the early modern period to the present day, including Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism (2011).

The lecture, entitled Miltonic Sovereignty Now, will focus on how ideas about popular sovereignty that were developed in the early modern period can inform how political power is conceptualized now, especially in light of the recent re-emergence of right-wing nationalism.

John Milton, seventeenth-century poet and political theorist, is an early advocate of a modern idea of popular sovereignty, even as he is not the least bit democratic in our usual sense of that term. At a moment when several polities in the world have taken a hard turn to right-wing nationalism, it is thus especially opportune to re-examine the set of political ideas that we find in Milton, and the ways in which they anticipate later thought on sovereignty and political theology, especially that of Carl Schmitt.

All are welcome to attend. For more information, contact margaret.reeves@ubc.ca.