One of the foremost intellectuals of his generation, French philosopher of science Michel Serres (1930–2019) broke free from disciplinary dogmas, boundaries, and definitions. The participants on this panel seek to illuminate the inspiration and riddles that Serres’s writing has had on their own work. They will examine some of Serres’s key interrogations of human existence, hinging on conceptual meridians like porosity, the parasite, and translation.

Two panelists, Andreas Bandak and Daniel M. Knight, have recently published an edited volume on Serres, Porous Becomings: Anthropological Engagements with Michel Serres.

Speakers

Andreas Bandak is Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Comparative Culture Studies in the Department for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He specializes in the themes of temporality and exemplarity and in anthropological studies of Syrian pasts and futures. He is the author of Exemplary Life: Modelling Sainthood in Christian Syria (Toronto, 2022) and has edited several volumes e.g. Ethnographies of Waiting: Doubt, Hope and Uncertainty (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Different Repetitions: Anthropological Engagements with Figures of Return, Recurrence and Redundancy (Routledge, 2021). Bandak has led several large research projects and will from 2025-28 lead the consortium ‘Times in Crisis, Times of Crisis: The Temporalities of Europe in Polycrisis’ (financed by Hera Chanse).

Daniel M. Knight is Reader in the Department of Social Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He has written extensively on time and crisis, philosophical and historical anthropology, and renewable energy as new extractive economy, primarily in the context of Greece. Daniel is author of six books, most recently Energy Talk: Green Knowledge from Greece’s Silicon Plains (Cornell University Press, 2025) and Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen (Berghahn, 2021). He co-edits History & Anthropology journal and convenes the ASA’s Anthropology of Time Network.

Brian Larkin is Co-Director of the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University and Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research explores how media technologies shape political rule, urban space, and religious and cultural life in Nigeria. Larkin is the author of Signal and Noise: Media Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Duke UP, 2008) and co-editor of Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (U of California P, 2000). He is currently working on a book titled Secular Machines: Media and the Materiality of Islamic Revival.

Elizabeth Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University, where she has also been the Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Law and Culture. She is also Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective.

Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.