Peter Szendy is David Herlihy Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Brown University. Among his recently published works in English: Powers of Reading: From Plato to Audiobooks (Zone Books, 2025); For an Ecology of Images (Verso, 2025); The Supermarket of the Visible: Toward a General Economy of Images (Fordham University Press, 2019); Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience (Fordham University Press, 2018). At the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Peter Szendy leads the Economies of Aesthetic Initiatives.
Laura Odello is Visiting Associate Professor in French and Francophone Studies, Visiting Associate Professor in Italian Studies at Brown University. An Italian native speaker, Laura Odello grew up and was educated in Italy before moving to Paris where she studied with Jacques Derrida, whose works she translated into Italian. She has taught a class on Italian feminism (in Italian) last semester, and team-taught with Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg a Cogut Collaborative seminar on Italian Thought in the spring of 2020. Next semester, she will teach a course in Italian which will explore the idea of the “open” and its structural opposite, “closure,” as they are expressed in Italian culture, between theory, literature, and cinema.
