We live in a time of acute historical anxiety. This anxiety manifests itself in various forms: ambivalence about our relationship to the past, a disorientating sense of ever-accelerating change, the fear of an unpredictable and uncontrollable future. How we conceive historical time is an essential component of the human effort to order and control lived reality. Historical anxiety occurs when established understandings of time no longer seem adequate to actual historical developments. This series will explore historical anxiety in the present and how it impacts our understanding of the past and future.

In recent years, concepts and metaphors of temporal disorder or paradox (“arrhythmia”, “crisis”, “heterochrony”, the “nonsimultaneity of the simultaneous”) have become more central to the study of historical time. Yet they are seen as exceptional occasions, and the language of “multiple temporalities” remains dominant. In this event, Stefanos Geroulanos will discuss the necessity of moving to a more dynamic and conflictual understanding of time, the effect this has on spatial and temporal metaphors, and how temporal conflict may be reconciled with a basic phenomenological or empirical sense of temporal continuity.

Stefanos Geroulanos is Professor of History and Director of the Remarque Institute at New York University. His research focuses of modern understandings of time, the human, and the body, as well as on postwar French thought. Among his recent books are Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present (2017), The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (2024), and the co-authored volume Power and Time (2020), of which a German translation appeared in 2023.

Website: https://www.stefanos-geroulanos.com

Academic Homepage: https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/stefanos-geroulanos.html

Nicholas Halmi is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford and Margaret Candfield Fellow of University College, Oxford. His current research is concerned with historical consciousness and historicization in the aesthetic realm, and with cultural periodization and the concept of Romanticism. Among his publications is The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (2007). He is completing a book called Historization, Aesthetics, and the Past.

Website: https://nicholashalmi.org
Homepage: https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-nicholas-halmi

Andrés Saenz de Sicilia is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University London and Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. He is author of  Subsumption in Kant, Hegel in Marx: From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Society (Brill, 2024), editor of Marx and the Critique of Humanism (Bloomsbury, forthcoming) and a managing editor of The Philosopher.
Website: https://andressaenzdesicilia.com

Academic homepage: https://www.nulondon.ac.uk/faculty/andres-saenz-de-sicilia/