Join Brooklyn Rail Co-Founder and Artistic Director Phong Bui, Brooklyn Rail Guest Critic Dr. Donatien Grau (University of Oxford), Professors Emily Apter (New York University), and Bachir Diagne (Columbia University), alongside New York Review of Books Classics Editor Edwin Frank for a panel discussion on the occasion of the launch of the Brooklyn Rail’s September issue with a special focus on New French Theory.
The “Guest Critic’s Pages” edited by Donatien Grau will feature texts by Emanuele Coccia, Tristan Garcia, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Catherine Malabou, Olivier Zahm and many more.

In English. No RSVP Necessary
Emily Apter is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of Comparative Literature at New York University. Her most recent books books include: Against World Literature: On The Politics of Untranslatability (2013), Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (co-edited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood) (2014); and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006). A French translation of The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature was published in 2016 by Fayard in the series “Ouvertures” edited by Barbara Cassin and Alain Badiou. Together with Bruno Bosteels she co-edited Alain Badiou’s The Age of the Poets and Other Writings on Poetry and Prose (Verso 2014). Her most recent project is Unexceptional Politics: A Glossary of Obstruction (forthcoming, Verso, 2017). She edits the book series Translation/Transnation for Princeton University Press.

Phong Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator and former curatorial advisor at MoMA PS1, 2007 to 2010. He is also the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of the monthly journal the Brooklyn Rail and the publishing press Rail Editions, as well as the Host/Producer of “Off the Rail” on Art International Radio. He is a board member of the Third Rail of the Twin Cities, the Miami Rail, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, and the International Association of Art Critics United States Section (AICA USA).
In 2013, he founded the Rail Curatorial Projects which aims to curate exhibits that respond specifically to location, cultural moment, and economic conditions.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is Professor of French and Philosophy at Columbia University. Before joining Columbia University in 2008 he taught philosophy for many years at Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar (Senegal) and at Northwestern University. His field of research includes history of logic, history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy, African philosophy and literature. His book Bergson postcolonial. L’élan vital dans la pensée de Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal, Paris, Editions du CNRS, 2011) was awarded the Dagnan-Bouveret prize by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences for 2011 and on that same year he received the Edouard Glissant Prize for his work. Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s current teaching interests include history of early modern philosophy, philosophy and Sufism in the Islamic world, African philosophy and literature, twentieth century French philosophy.

Born in Boulder, Colorado in 1960, Edwin Frank studied at Harvard and Columbia Universities and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His poems are collected in Snake Train, and he is currently at work on a critical history of the novel in the twentieth-century. Frank is the founder and editor of the New York Review Books Classics series.

Dr. Donatien Grau is a member of New College, University of Oxford. An editor-at-large of Purple Fashion Magazine, a contributing editor of Flash Art International, a member of the editorial boards of the French publications Commentaire and La Règle du Jeu. The co-editor of the book series “Figures” with Grasset, he is the author of half a dozen books, including Tout contre Sainte-Beuve (Grasset, 2013), called by Edmund White “a fascinating new study”, in The New York Review of Books, and , on the occasion of Néron en Occident (Gallimard, 2015), Glen Bowersock called him “a talented French writer”, in The New York Review of Books as well. He has edited, published or contributed to over a hundred publications worldwide, in philosophy, the visual arts, literature, fashion, Ancient history and in particular Ancient Roman numismatics.