Symposium / “Curiosity and Method”

Date: Saturday, 9 April 2011, 10 am–6:30 pm
Location: Betts Auditorium, Architecture Building, Princeton University (map and directions)
FREE. No RSVP necessary

With its fortieth issue, released in January of this year, Cabinet celebrated ten years of publication. We are using the occasion as a way of thinking both retrospectively and prospectively about some keywords that have been important to us in framing our project. These themes include amateurism, curiosity, pranks, the ordinary, deception, attention, the ethics of listening, and more. This all-day symposium gathers a diverse group of extraordinary writers and thinkers to help us sift through these keywords and to allow us to ask questions about Cabinet’s successes and failures. The symposium will be followed by a reception during which there will be a number of short readings (five minutes each) from Cabinet’s first decade.

We hope you can join us for all of part of the symposium and for the reception that follows. The full program is as below:

10–11:30
Anthony Grafton on pranks and games
Simon Critchley on fiction and deception
Marina Warner on pleasure

11:45–12:45
Jeff Dolven on the ordinary
Margaret Wertheim on the amateur

1–2
Lunch

2–3:30
Lorraine Daston on attention
Daniel Rosenberg on listening
Leland de la Durantaye on citation and originality

3:45–4:45
Justin E. H. Smith on the politics of curiosity
Barbara M. Benedict on collecting

5–6:30
Reception, followed by readings and performances, at the Chancellor Green Rotunda
Readers include Priscilla Becker, Mary Walling Blackburn, the Chadwicks (Lytle Shaw and Jimbo Blachly), Emilie Clark, Shelley Jackson, Alexander Nagel, George Prochnik, and others (list in formation)

Organized by Yara Flores, and sponsored by Princeton University’s Center for Collaborative History, Program in History of Science, School of Architecture, and IHUM