Humanities on the Edge is a speaker series co-founded by Dr. Marco Abel and Dr. Roland Végsö, who now co-ordinate the series together with Dr. Jeannette Jones (Department of History and Institute for Ethnic Studies), and Carrie L. Morgan (Curator of Academic Programs at the Sheldon). Founded in 2010, the series is now in its seventh year, and its mission remains the same: to promote cross-disciplinary conversation and theoretical research in the Humanities.

R. A. Judy is Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches course in world literature, critical and literary theory, and literary criticism. He is a member of the Editorial Collective of boundary 2, an international journal of literature and culture, published by Duke University Press. Having done undergraduate studies in Islamic studies and Arabic literature at al-Azhar University, Cairo Egypt, Professor Judy received his BA in Islamic philosophy and culture from the University of Minnesota in 1982, and his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota in 1990. A Recipient of prestigious honors from the Ford and Mellon Foundations, he was a Fulbright Fellow at the Institut Bourguiba des Langues Vivantes, Université de Tunis I, in Tunis, Tunisia, and has traveled extensively in the Middle East and North Africa. Professor Judy is the author of (Dis)forming the American Canon: The Vernacular of African Arabic American Slave Narrative (1992), and has edited numerous special issues and dossiers for boundary 2, among which are: Tunisia Dossier (2012), Ralph Ellison: The Next Fifty Years (2003); Sociology Hesitant: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dynamic Thinking (2001), Reasoning and the Logic of Things Global, (1999), and Scattered Speculations on Value: Exchange Between Etienne Balibar, Antonio Negri, and Gayatri Spivak (1999). Each of these issues have elaborated the work of critical theory and literary criticism across fields as diverse as Black studies, global English studies, modern Arabic literary studies, and comparative literature. Professor Judy has also published numerous essays in the areas of philosophy, contemporary Islamic philosophy, literary/cultural theory, music, and Arabic and American literatures. Among these are: “Restless Tunisians” in La Tunisie du XXIe siècle: Quels pouvoirs pour quels modèles de société? (EuroOrient, 2012), “Dreaming About the Singularity of the New Middle Ages: Three Provisional Notes on the Question of Imagination” (Critical Zone 3, 2009); “Some Thoughts on Naguib Mahfouz in the Spirit of Secular Criticism” (boundary 2, 2007), “Sayyid Qutb’s fiqh al- waqi‘i, or New Realist Science” (boundary 2, 2004), “The Threat to Islamic Humanity After 11 September 2001” (Critical Quarterly, 2003), “September 11 Uttorkal O Bipponno Islami Manobota” (Abobhash 3, 2003), “Islamiyya and the Construction of Human Being” in Trends in Islamic Thought (1998), “The New Black Aesthetic and W.E.B. Du Bois, or Hephaestus, Limping” (The Massachusetts Review, 1994), “The Question of Nigga Authenticity” (boundary 2, 1994), and “Kant and the Negro,” (Surfaces, 1991). He is currently finishing up the manuscript for a book project under contract with Fordham University Press, entitled “Thinking in Disorder: Essays of Poetic Socialities in Radical Humanism,” as well as working on a subsequent book project tentatively called “Fanon, the Last Negro and the Revolutionary Poetics of Sociality.” Event is free and open to the public