Gregg Lambert

Gregg Lambert (born 1961) is an American philosopher and literary theorist, who writes on Baroque and Neo-Baroque cultural history, critical theory and film, the contemporary university, and especially on the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. Between 2008 and 2014, he was the founding director of Syracuse University Humanities Center, where he currently holds a research appointment as Dean’s Professor of Humanities.

Biography

Between 1984 and 1987, Lambert was a Fellow in the Center for Hermeneutic Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, where he completed a Masters program in Theology and Literature, and graduate studies in French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory from the University of California at Irvine under the direction of the late-French philosopher Jacques Derrida and literary theorist Gabriele Schwab.

In 1996, Lambert joined the Department of English at Syracuse University and was later appointed as Chair between 2005 and 2008, before leaving the department to take up his current position at the Syracuse University Humanities Center.^[1] Since 2008, Lambert is also Principal Investigator of the Central New York Humanities Corridor.^[2] In 2013 he was elected as a member of the International Advisory Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes.^[3]

Work

Consisting of several books and edited volumes, Lambert's published work covers a wide range of disciplines and topics, including the history of literary criticism and theory, contemporary continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, issues in the general Humanities and contemporary academic institutions. He has also published over fifty articles in peer reviewed journals in several different fields, encyclopedias, textbooks and collected volumes. Lambert's writings have been translated into Chinese, French, Korean, Japanese, Norwegian, and other languages. Lambert is co-editor of the academic journal Deleuze Studies (University of Edinburgh Press).^[4]

Lambert is a noted optimist about the future of the humanities.^[5] Even though he admits that the humanities have taken their share of hits in recent years, like cuts in funding and an increasing emphasis on science and technology within society and the academy, Lambert is optimistic about the future of the humanities. In his view, the supposed 'crisis in the humanities' is primarily a media hyperbole, which has nothing to do with the real situation in the humanities today. Several of his projects actively perform his main argument for the vitality of the contemporary humanities, which centers around the idea that “the academy is providing opportunities for humanities students to cope with the new paradigm of globalization”.^[6]

As Co-Founder of The Perpetual Peace Project,^[7] a partnership between the European Union National Institutes of Culture (EUNIC), the International Peace Institute (IPI), the United Nations University, Slought Foundation, Syracuse University, Utrecht University, and the Treaty of Utrecht Foundation, Lambert is engaged in bringing together theorists and practitioners in revisiting 21st century prospects for international peace, on the basis of Immanuel Kant's foundational essay "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch" (1795).^[8] He is the producer of a film by the same name, which consists of a series of short videos of several philosophers, sociologists, and diplomats speaking about peace.^[9] Lambert also serves on the Advisory Board of the Histories of Violence project.^[10]

His forthcoming book Philosophy after Friendship: Deleuze's Conceptual Personae (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) deals with the history of philosophy's "conceptual personae", Deleuze, as well as the dominant psycho-social figures of the stranger, the friend, the enemy, and the refugee or survivor and the “Other Person”.

Publications

Books

• 2016 Return Statements: The Return of Religion in Contemporary Philosophy, ISBN 9781474413916.
• 2012 In Search of a New Image of Thought: Gilles Deleuze and Philosophical Expressionism, ISBN 9780816678037.
• 2008 On the (New) Baroque, ISBN 1888570970.
• 2006 Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?, ISBN 9781847060099.
• 2004 The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture, ISBN 9780826466488.
• 2002 The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, ISBN 9780826459558.
• 2001 Report to the Academy (re: The New Conflict of Faculties), ISBN 9781888570618.

Edited volumes

• 2012 (with Daniel W. Smith) Deleuze: a Philosophy of the Event, ISBN 9780748645855.
• 2006 (with Victor E. Taylor) Jean Francois Lyotard: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, ISBN 9780415338196.
• 2005 (with Ian Buchanan) Deleuze and Space, ISBN 9780748618743.

References