Carpenter Lecture Series—Fred Moten

Fred Moten

The UChicago English Department is pleased to announce Fred Moten will be our speaker for the 2023 Carpenter Lecture Series. Professor Moten’s lectures are entitled "The case of blackness: anthology, sociology, echomusecology."

Add the date to your calendar now!
March 20th-24th, 2023
Lectures Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 4:30-6 PM

Swift Hall, Third Floor Lecture Room

Fred Moten

Fred Moten image

Fred Moten is Professor in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts. He holds an A.B. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.


Moten teaches courses and conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics and critical theory. He is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2009); B. Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010); The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014), The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), The Service Porch (Letter Machine Editions, 2016), a three-volume collection of essays whose general title is consent not to be a single being (Duke University Press, 2017, 2018) and All that Beauty (Letter Machine Editions, 2019). Moten is also co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2013) and A Poetics of the Undercommons (Sputnik and Fizzle, 2016) and, with Wu Tsang, of Who touched me? (If I Can’t Dance, I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution, 2016). Moten has served on the editorial boards of Callaloo, Discourse, American Quarterly and Social Text; as a member of the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine; on the board of directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York; and on the advisory board of Issues in Critical Investigation, Vanderbilt University.

Carpenter Lectures

Frederic Ives Carpenter (1861-1925) was for many years an eminent professor of medieval and Renaissance literature in the Department of English. The Carpenter lectureship was endowed in 1925 to memorialize Professor Carpenter's personal commitment to the highest excellence in scholarship and teaching and to perpetuate that commitment in a broader way. The Carpenter lecturer generally spends a week at the University, with the centerpiece of the visit being a series of three lectures. The lecturer will, in addition, visit graduate workshops, hold office hours, and spend time informally engaged with faculty and students. Previous Carpenter Lecturers include Edward Said, Stanley Cavell, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Judith Butler, Catherine Gallagher, Michael Warner, Susan Buck-Morss, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Franco Moretti, and Jacqueline Rose, Elizabeth Grosz, and Rey Chow.

Recent Lectures

  • Rey Chow: "Acousmatic Sound and the Writing Voice in Cinema: A Preliminary Discussion" (Autumn 2015)
  • Elizabeth Grosz: "The Incorporeal" (Spring 2015)
  • Bruno Latour: "Facing Gaia: American and European Perspective" and "The New Body Politik Requires a New Body" (October 2017)
  • Maureen N. McLane: (Monday, April 20, 2020) "Conditional Poetics: Instruments, Elements, Plurality, Parameter;" (Wednesday, April 22, 2020) "Toward a Notational Poetics: Or, Now;" (Thursday, April 23, 2020) "A Reading of Poems and Divigations." Talks and reading will be held at 5:00 in the third-floor lecture hall of Swift Hall and are free and open to the public. Receptions on Monday and Thursday will follow.