Daniel Smith
Please join me in congratulating Daniel Smith, professor of philosophy, who recently received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to translate a series of seminar lectures given by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
The three-year award for $294,236 will allow Daniel and his colleagues to translate several lectures that Deleuze (1925–1995) gave at the University of Paris 8, where he taught for many years. The translations will be posted online and freely available to scholars, both at a CLA webpage and at the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR).
Deleuze, who authored more than 25 books, is widely recognized as one of the most influential and important French philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. Several of his books, such as Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, have become classics in their fields. Large crowds attended his seminars from 1979–1987, and recordings of Deleuze's lectures were ultimately archived at the the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
The transcriptions of the seminars were supported by a Global Synergy Grant from the College of Liberal Arts, which continued work that had been initiated by a team at the University of Paris 8 at Vincennes/St. Denis. Daniel has translated two of Deleuze’s books, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation and Essays Critical and Clinical.
Daniel’s collaborators include Nicolae Morar, a CLA alumnus and an assistant professor in philosophy and environmental studies at the University of Oregon, and Thomas Nail, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Denver, who will help edit the translation. The webpage was designed by Agile Humanities Agency and will be maintained and updated by Justin Litaker, who received his Ph.D. from Purdue's Department of Philosophy and now teaches at the University of South Alabama. The project database is hosted at the Purdue University Research Repository, where Michael Witt, the director of PURR, and Matthew Kroll, a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Research Data and the Digital Humanities at Purdue, are serving a co-collaborators.
The project’s translators are Samantha Bankston, who received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Purdue and is the author of Deleuze and Becoming (Bloomsbury, 2017); Mary Beth Mader, professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Memphis; Melissa McMahon, a professional translator who earned her doctorate degree in philosophy at the University of Sydney; and Christopher Penfield, who received his doctorate degree in philosophy from Purdue in 2015, and is now assistant professor of philosophy at Sweet Briar College.
Congratulations to you and your team, Professor Smith!
David A. Reingold
Justin S. Morrill Dean
College of Liberal Arts