Our keynote speaker at the 2023 Charles F. Fraker Conference will be Dr. Eduardo Cadava, Philip Mayhew Professor of English at Princeton University.

Eduardo Cadava is Professor of English, and an Associate Member of the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the School of Architecture, the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. He also serves on the Executive Committees of the Program in Media and Modernity, the Program in European Cultural Studies, the Program in Latin American Studies, and the Program in Jazz Studies. He is a faculty member in the summer program at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and he has been the Benjamin Menschel Distinguished Visiting Professor in Architecture at Cooper Union, a Professor in the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, and a Visiting Professor at the San Francisco Art Institute and in the Department of Political Science at the University of Athens. He was the Head of Wilson College from 2009 – 2017, and the curator of the Wilson College Signature Lecture Series. He specializes in American literature and culture, comparative literature, media technologies, literary and political theory, and theory of translation. He has written extensively on literature, philosophy, photography, architecture, music, democracy, war, memory and forgetting, race and slavery, human rights and citizenship, and the ethics of decision. 

He is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton UP), Emerson and the Climates of History (Stanford UP), and, with Fazal Sheikh, of Fazal Sheikh: Portraits (Steidl). He also has co-edited Who Comes After the Subject? (Routledge), Cities Without Citizens (The Slought Foundation and the Rosenbach Museum), a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly entitled And Justice for All?: The Claims of Human Rights (Duke UP), and The Itinerant Languages of Photography (Princeton University Art Museum and Yale UP). He is the President of the Executive Board of the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia and he has co-curated installations and exhibitions at the Slought Foundation, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Al-Ma’mal Center for Contemporary Art in East Jerusalem, and the Princeton University Art Museum, and he has co-produced and co-edited a DVD entitled Unpacking Derrida’s Library (Slought Foundation and PIIRS).

He has translated several works by Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Maurice Blanchot, and has introduced and co-translated Nadar’s memoirs, Quand j’étais photographe, which appeared with MIT Press in 2015 under the title When I Was a Photographer. A collection of his essays on photography appeared in Spanish under the title La imagen en ruinas in Santiago, Chile in 2015. His book Paper Graveyards (The MIT Press, 2021), a collection of essays that spans twenty years from 9/11 to the COVID-19 pandemic, was awarded the Frank Jewett Mather Award, College Art Association, 2023.