This year, the Paris Center is excited to present The Global Focus Lecture Series. A forum to discuss some of the most pressing and thought-provoking global issues of our day, the series begins with "Hijacking Human Rights: Neoliberalism and the End of the Third World," a lecture by Columbia professor Joseph Slaughter.  The event will be followed by a reception.

Free and open to the public. A reservation is required. Spaces are limited.

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Professor Slaughter specializes in literature, law, and socio-cultural history of the Global South (particularly Latin America and Africa). He’s especially interested in the social work of literature—the myriad ways in which literature intersects (formally, historically, ideologically, materially) with problems of social justice, human rights, intellectual property, and international law.

His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Public Voices Fellowship, Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award. His book Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (Fordham UP, 2007), which explores the cooperative narrative logics of international human rights law and the Bildungsroman, was awarded the 2008 René Wellek prize for comparative literature and cultural theory. His essay, “Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law,” was honored as one of the two best articles published in PMLA in 2006-7. He was elected to serve as President of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2016.