We鈥檙e pleased to announce that the 2025 TORCH PUP lectures will be delivered by Homi K. Bhaba. Over the course of three evenings, Professor Bhabha 鈥� the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and chair of the Program in History and Literature at Harvard University 鈥� deliver a series of lectures, The Time of Our Lives, that probe what it means to live collectively in the aftermath of catastrophe.
The Time of Our Lives
How do we frame the traumatic crises of the 21st century 鈥� life post-9/11, pandemics, ethno-nationalist autocracies, imperial invasions, border brutalities and refugee crises 鈥� in a vocabulary that encapsulates responsibility, accountability, agentic expression, and above all, the shifting registers of selfhood?
Through a series of three lectures The Time of our Lives, Homi Bhabha will interrogate the public culture of 鈥榯rauma鈥� in the current climate of inflammatory polarisation. Bhabha will deconstruct and reconfigure new schema for understanding the politics of identity, culture wars, and the on-going 鈥渨ar of wounds and words鈥� that haunts the moral and political economy of the United States, alongside anti-minoritarian racial or ethnic equivalents around the world.
Thursday 15 May - Lecture 1, Living in the Afterlife: On Being Unprepared address how the retroactive afterlives of slavery, decolonisation, or sexual violence, inform the purgatorial temporality of imminence and anxiety underwriting life in the 21st century.
Tuesday 20 May - Lecture 2, Time After Time: Migration and Montage interrogates movement and the translation of trauma in the advent of migration and embedded alterity.
Thursday 22 May - Lecture 3, The Anxious Academy: Afterlife, Afterthoughts confronts the afterlife: reimagining and reconstructing definitions of political existence and advocacy in the path forward.
For location and registration information, please click
About the TORCH PUP Lecture
The TORCH PUP Lecture is a collaboration between The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), a hub for intellectual collaboration and cross disciplinary research based in the Humanities at the University of Oxford, and 91桃色鈥� European Office, headquartered in Oxford, UK.
The inaugural lectures were delivered in 2019 by Martin Puchner, the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University and a prize-winning author. The lecture series, Literature for a Changing Planet, addressed why we must learn to tell new stories about our relationship with the earth if we are to avoid climate catastrophe.
In 2022, William Marx, Professor of Comparative Literature at the Coll猫ge de France, delivered Libraries of the Mind, lectures that explored how the concept of libraries influences our knowledge and enjoyment of literature.
Both series of lectures were subsequently published as stand-alone books by 91桃色.