Distinguished Speakers

Professor of Comparative Literature, Princeton University

Claudia Brodsky is a professor of comparative literature at Princeton University, where she has taught since 1985. She earned her B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard and her Ph.D. with distinction in comparative literature from Yale, studying under figures including Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Harold Bloom. She was elected Directeur de Programme at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and has held Humboldt Faculty and Howard Fellowships. She has advised over forty Ph.D. students across comparative literature, German, Spanish and Portuguese, and architecture.

Philosopher of Physics, Harvard University (Dept. of Philosophy and Dept. of Physics)

Jacob Barandes is a philosopher of physics at Harvard University, with faculty appointments in both the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Physics. His research spans quantum foundations, causation, probability, spacetime, and laws of nature, with particular interest in interpretations of quantum theory and the measurement problem. He is a Faculty Affiliate with Harvard's Black Hole Initiative and a Fellow of the John Bell Institute, and he founded the annual New England Workshop on the History and Philosophy of Physics as well as the Boston Network for History and Philosophy of Physics.

Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University

Barry Loewer is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, where he has taught since 1989 and served as chair and graduate director. He earned his Ph.D. at Stanford, writing a dissertation on modality and the semantics of names with Jaakko Hintikka, and began his career at the University of South Carolina, where he began a long collaboration with David Albert on the philosophy of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. He and Albert currently co-direct a major project in the philosophy of cosmology, and he teaches courses in philosophy of science and philosophical logic.

Associate Professor of Philosophy, Bucknell University

Maria Balcells is an associate professor of philosophy at Bucknell University. Her work centers on the tension between our experience of a dynamic world in which time passes and an image of time consistent with our best science, in which events exist equally and eternally across spacetime. She draws on cognitive science, physics, and Indigenous philosophies in this research and has served as vice-president of the Philosophy of Time Society. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago and her B.A. from Rutgers University.

Professor of Psychology, Yale University

Lila Davachi is a cognitive neuroscientist and professor of psychology at Yale University whose work explores how the brain transforms everyday experience into lasting memory. She earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Yale, training under Patricia Goldman-Rakic, and previously held positions at Columbia University and the Nathan Kline Institute. Her research on event segmentation shows how the brain divides continuous experience into meaningful units, and she has also advanced understanding of spontaneous memory replay. Her honors include the Cognitive Neuroscience Society's Young Investigator Award and Columbia's Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award.