This conference honors the writing and teaching of Stanley Cavell, born in Atlanta in 1926.

Cavell studied music as an undergraduate at Berkeley and spent most of a year at Julliard, where he found going to the movies and reading Freud more interesting than his work as a pianist and composer. Cavell’s journey to philosophy led him back to Berkeley, and then to Harvard, where he became Professor of the General Theory of Value. (These and other episodes are recounted in Cavell’s autobiography Little Did I Know (Stanford, 2010).

The conference will investigate the full range of Cavell’s work in philosophy, literature, film studies, and American Studies including his discussions of such figures as Shakespeare, Ibsen, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Emerson, and Thoreau. Among Cavell’s 18 books are three about film, of which Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, (Harvard, 1981) is one of his most accessible.

Cavell had ties with Albuquerque and UNM. English professor Michael Fischer published the first book on Cavell, Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism (Chicago, 1989), and Cavell was the inspiration for Russell Goodman’s American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge, 1990). Cavell was also a participant in Goodman’s NEH institute (at St. John’s in Santa Fe) on Emerson, and in his 2005 NEH Summer Seminar on Emerson, held at UNM.

The idea for this conference arose from discussions between Russell and Sandra Laugier, professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, who translated many of Cavell’s works into French and has written extensively about him. She is one of the distinguished international speakers who have agreed to attend.

Other speakers are:

Jocelyn Benoist, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne

Jeroen Gerrits, Binghamton University, State University of New York

Andrew Norris, University of California, Santa Barbara

Naoko Saito, Kyoto University

Piergiorgio Donatelli, University of Rome

Mathias Girel, École Normale Supérieure

Paul Livingston, UNM

Sara ben Asher, UNM

Russell Goodman, UNM