Green Dreams | In Arcadia, Money Heist, Spark Death: How to Find Meaning and Assert Control Through Aestheticizing Waste
Green Dreams, a series of discussions on utopian architecture, science and ecology, presents faculty “lightning lectures” from the Brooklyn Institute of Social Research:
Raphaele Chappe on the “Money Heist;” Rebecca Ariel Porte on “In Arcadia,” and Patrick Blanchfield on “Spark Death: How to Find Meaning and Assert Control Through Aestheticizing Waste.”
Patrick Blanchfield is an academic and a journalist. He holds an AB with Honors in Literature from Harvard College and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University. He is also a graduate of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute’s four-year training program in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. Patrick writes about gun violence, trauma, religion, and masculinity. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, n+1, Dissent, The New Inquiry, Foreign Policy, and many other venues. He is currently a Henry R. Luce Initiative in Religion in International Affairs Postdoctoral Fellow at the NYU Center for Religion and Media. He can be found on Twitter @patblanchfield.
Raphaële Chappe holds a PhD in Economics from The New School for Social Research, an LL.M from New York University School of Law, a Master’s degree in Comparative Business Law from the University of Pantheon-Sorbonne in Paris, France, and an LL.B in Law and French Law from King’s College London. Her research interests include the link between financial markets and wealth inequality; political economy and the history of economic thought; and the philosophical foundations of microeconomics. More generally she is interested in interdisciplinary research, drawing from insights in economics and the social sciences as well as legal theory to analyze modern capitalism and financial markets. She has practiced as an attorney for eight years in the financial services industry and also teaches at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. She enjoys French comic books and mangas, fine chocolates, and classical Spanish guitar. Raphaële lives in Brooklyn with her wife and their twin daughter and son.
Rebecca Ariel Porte holds a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research, which centers on nineteenth- and twentieth-century movements in British and American poetry, concentrates on crossings between early analytic philosophy and modern theories of poetics and aesthetics. Other intellectual radiants include theories of enchantment and disenchantment, microcosm and macrocosm, Gedankenexperiment, negative capability, hylozoism, chamber pop, changelings, clouds, and a Fregean logic puzzle called “Hesperus is Phosphorus.” Reviews and essays have appeared in the Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and io9, among other publications.