Keynote Speakers

Franco Berardi, also known as Bifo, is a writer and media activist. He studied in Bologna in the 1960s, where he was a member of the organization “Poder Obrero”. In the 1970s, he founded the magazine A/traverso and participated in the Autonomist movement. In the 1990s, he organized the first European Congress on digital mutation (Cibernauti, Bologna, 1994). In 1995, he published the book Neuromagma. He has collaborated with several magazines, including Metropoli (Rome), Semiotexte (New York) and Chimeres (Paris). In recent years, he has published Respirare, The Threshold, The Third Unconscious. His next book is dedicated to the theme of desertion as the only ethical possibility and as a strategy of struggle and liberation.

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz is Full Professor in Anthropology at the University of São Paulo and Global Scholar and Visiting Professor at Princeton. Her publications include, in Portuguese: Retrato em branco e negro (1987), A longa viagem da biblioteca dos reis (2002), O sol do Brasil (2008), Dicionário da escravidão e da Liberdade (2018), with Flavio Gomes, Sobre o autoritarismo no Brasil (2019); and in English: Spectacle of Races: Scientists, Institutions and Racial Theories in Brazil at the End of the XIXth Century (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 1999), The Emperors beard: D. Pedro II a tropical king (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2004), Brazil: a biography (with Heloisa Starling) (Farrar Strauss and Giroux and Penguin UK, 2015), Lima Barreto sad visionary, The Brazil Reader: History, culture, politica (with James Green and Victoria Langland) (2018, Duque University Press), About authoritarianism (Princeton University Press, 2021), Death Dancer: the Spanish Flu in Brazil (2020), Black Encyclopedia (2021), The Kidnapping of independence (2022).

Odd Arne Westad is a scholar of modern international and global history, with a specialization in the history of eastern Asia since the 18th century. Westad has published 16 books, most of which deal with twentieth century Asian and global history. Since the mid-2000s, Westad has been concerned with aspects of post-colonial and global history, as well as the modern history of China. The three key works from this period are The Global Cold War, Restless Empire, and The Cold War: A World History. Today Westad is mainly interested in researching histories of empire and imperialism, first and foremost in Asia, but also world-wide. He is also trying to figure out how China’s late twentieth century economic reforms came into being and how their outcomes changed the global economy.

Vanessa Schwartz specializes in 19th and 20th c. European and American visual culture, especially photography, film and design. Her new book Jet Age Aesthetic: The Glamour of Media in Motion is now available (Yale University Press) and was supported by a Millard Meiss award from the College Art Association and a Furthermore Foundation grant. With Jason Hill, she co-edited Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News (2015). She is also a co-curator for "Enfin le cinéma!", which opened at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, September 2021, and co-curator of the related show "City of Cinema: Paris 1850-1907" which opened at LACMA in February 2022. She has written extensively about Paris in the late 19th century and the origins of mass visual culture in her books Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in fin-de-siècle Paris (1998), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (1995) and It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (2007). She is also the author of Modern France: A Very Short Introduction (2011).