The limits of “data” as the unit of humanistic study will be the topic of this year’s Culler Lecture in Critical Theory at the Society for the Humanities. Entitled “On Behalf of the Anexact: Along the Lines of Franz Kafka, Paul Klee, Len Lye,” the lecture will be delivered by Jane Bennett, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. The talk will take place in the A.D. White House Guerlac Room at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, March 19, and will be followed by a reception. This event is free and open to the public, and no registration is required.

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Bennett is a founding scholar of the field of new materialism, with expertise in environmental political philosophy, American Romanticism, political affect and contemporary social thought. Her talk will address the role of the humanities in relation to the rise of “data science” as the signature focus of the twenty-first century American research university. She considers some literary and artistic efforts to conceptualize what she calls the “anexact”: subtle phenomena in democratic life that refuse to conform to the rigid boundaries and additive logic of data.

“We couldn’t imagine a more fitting scholar to deliver the Culler Lecture this year,” said Alexander Livingston, associate director of the Society for the Humanities and associate professor in the Department of Government (A&S). “Jane Bennett has fundamentally transformed the ways scholars understand the complicated entanglement of the human and the nonhuman worlds. Her path-breaking work on environmental political thought and ‘the political lives of things’ has defined the state of the field across the humanities for over a decade.”

Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences website.