Wendy Brown: "Does Human Capital have a Gender?" Feb. 13

Wendy Brown, the Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, will present "Does Human Capital Have a Gender? Homo Oeconomicus and the Neoliberal Transformation of Politics" at 4 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 13, in the Shriver Center multipurpose room.

Wendy Brown, the Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, will give the Linda Singer Memorial Lecture of the philosophy department. Her lecture is also part of the Altman Program of the Humanities Center.

Her talk is the Linda Singer Memorial Lecture of the philosophy department and part of the 2013-14 Altman Program of the Humanities Center.

Brown's current research concerns the de-democratizing effects of neoliberal political rationality. She will discuss related ideas from her forthcoming book, Neoliberalism and the Undoing of Democracy, in which she considers the specific form of philosopher Michel Foucault’s notion of homo oeconomicus in contemporary neoliberal reason. (Homo oeconomicus is the concept in many economic theories of humans as rational and narrowly self-interested actors).

Author of eight books, her work has been translated into more than 15 languages. She has held numerous distinguished visiting lectureships, most recently as a Senior Invited Fellow of the Center for Humanities at Cornell University, and currently as a visiting professor at Columbia University.

Her lecture is free and open to the public.