Bruno Bosteels, professor of Romance studies, has been awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Seminar in the Humanities from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Bosteels will conduct seminars on "Theories of the Subject" during May-June 2011 and 2012. He will revisit major texts and concerns in the theoretical humanities that develop genealogical, psychoanalytical or political theories of the subjects, roughly from Nietzsche until today.

The goal is to come to a critical understanding of the centrality of the notion of the subject as one of the founding concepts of modernity, as well as to draw out the consequences of its crisis in radical humanistic (or posthumanistic) thought today.

Mellon Dissertation Seminars typically take place in the summer, and are held in all fields of the humanities with the goal of encouraging graduate students to consider the relationship of their research and writing to various theories of interpretation and methods of scholarship. Within the program's broad framework, seminar leaders establish the subject matter and methodological perspectives the seminars address.

Participation is open to graduate students from the leaders' departments and others in their institution, as well as those studying elsewhere as the leaders deem appropriate.