Rationality in Drama & Fiction.

 

PRESENTERS
&
PARTICIPANTS.

 

Steven J. Brams is Professor of Politics at New York University and the author, co-author, or co-editor of 15 books and about 250 articles. His most recent books are Theory of Moves (1994) and, co-authored with Alan D. Taylor, Fair Division: From Cake-Cutting to Dispute Resolution (1996) and The Win-Win Solution: Guaranteeing Fair Shares to Everybody (1999). He has applied game theory and social-choice theory to voting and elections, bargaining and fairness, international relations, and the Bible, theology, and fiction. He is a former president of the Peace Science Society (1990-91) and the Public Choice Society (2004-2006), a Guggenheim Fellow (1986-1987), a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar (1998-99), and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Sarah Churchwell is a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of East Anglia. Her first book, The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, was published by Granta in the UK in 2004 and by Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt) in the US in 2005. She is currently completing a study on screwball comedy from the 1930s, for publication in 2008. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the TLS, the Independent, the Observer, and she is a frequent contributor to radio and television programmes including Newsnight Review and The Cinema Show for the BBC.

Jenny Davidson is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She writes about eighteenth-century literature and culture; other interests include British cultural and intellectual history and the contemporary novel in English. She is the author of a novel, Heredity (U.S., Soft Skull, 2003; U.K., Serpent's Tail, 2005). Her book Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen was published by Cambridge UP in 2004, and she has just finished a new book called Breeding: Nature and Nurture Before Biology. In 2005-2006, she was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, MA.

Toni Griffiths is currently working on a book on George Eliot and the idea of a 'psychoanalytic aesthetic', her PhD research having been in the field of Literature and Psychoanalysis. She has also conducted research in the field of work related learning and has been Pro-Director (International) at the Institute of Education, University of London, and Director of Education and Professional Development at University College London.

Ernst-Wilhelm Händler is the author of several novels. He studied Philosophy, Management Science and Economics at the University of Munich where he received a PhD in 1980. He is the recipient of the 1999 Erik-Reger Prize and the 2006 Hans-Erich-Nossack Prize. His latest novel, Die Frau des Schriftstellers, was published by Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt in 2006.

Heike Harmgart is an economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development where she has particular responsibilities for Armenia and Turkmenistan. She holds a PhD in Economics from University College London and is also affiliated with the Institute for Fiscal Studies. She has published about the Florida election disaster, supermarket regulation and problems of trust. More recently, she has co-authored (with Steffen Huck and Wieland Müller) three articles on Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser.

Håkan Holm is Professor of Economics at Lund University in Sweden. He received his PhD on a thesis on complexity in economic theory. His main research interests are in experimental economics, applied game theory and industrial organization. Recently, he has written papers on trust and lying in strategic situations.

Steffen Huck is Professor of Economics at University College London. Previously he held posts at Royal Holloway, Humboldt University and the University of Frankfurt. The recipient of a 2004 Philip Leverhulme Prize, his research has investigated the role of trust and fairness for competition as well as issues in bounded rationality and evolutionary game theory.

Sir Peter Jonas was General Director of the English National Opera from 1985 to 1991. In 1993 he became General Director of the Bavarian State Opera, a post he held until he retired in 2006. He has a first degree in English Literature and studied Opera and Music History as a postgraduate. In 1974 he joined the Chicago Symphony Orchestra where he was Director of Artistic Administration before he moved to ENO. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal College of Music. He was knighted on New Year's day 2000. He holds teaching posts at the Universities of St. Gallen and Zurich and the Bayerische Theaterakademie.

Dirk Kurbjuweit is a journalist for the German news magazine Der Spiegel and the author of five novels. He studied economics and journalism. Prior to joining Der Spiegel in 1999 he wrote for almost one decade for Die Zeit. He also wrote the screenplays for two movies based on his novels (Die Einsamkeit der Krokodile, 2000, and Schussangst, 2003). He is the recipient of two Egon-Erwin-Kisch Prizes (1998 and 2002) for best reporting.

Marion Ledwig is Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, and received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Konstanz, Germany. Her main interests are emotion theory, decision theory, the philosophy of Thomas Reid, causation theory, and truth theory. She is the author of Reid's Philosophy of Psychology (2005), Emotions: Their Rationality and Consistency (2006), and Common Sense: Its History, Method, and Applicability (2007).

Paisley Livingston is Professor of Philosophy at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His books include Ingmar Bergman and the Rituals of Art (Cornell UP), Literary Knowledge (Cornell UP), Models of Desire (Johns Hopkins UP), Literature and Rationality (Cambridge UP), and Art and Intention (Oxford UP, forthcoming).

Wieland Müller is Professor of Economics at Tilburg University. He studied Mathematics in Dresden and Berlin before pursuing a PhD in Economics at Humboldt University. His main research interests are in game theory, industrial organization, and experimental economics. More recently, he has worked with Harmgart and Huck on rational choice hermeneutics.

Keith Oatley is Director of the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Toronto. A Fellow of the British Psychological Society and of the Royal Society of Canada, he has been a lecturer at the University of Sussex and a professor at the Universities of Glasgow and Toronto. His research has been on emotions and on the psychology of fiction as a kind of simulation that runs of minds. He has written five books of psychology, including Best laid schemes (Cambridge University Press), and is co-author of the standard textbook on emotions Understanding emotions, 2nd edition by Oatley, Keltner & Jenkins (Blackwell). He has published two novels. The first, The case of Emily V. (Secker & Warburg), about a young woman who is investigated by both Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel. The second was A Natural History (Penguin Canada), about a Victorian researcher seeking the cause of infectious diseases.

Stian Reimers researches judgement and decision making at University College London, with a particular interest in financial decision making and 'self-defeating' impulsive behaviour. He received a PhD in Experimental Psychology from Emmanuel College Cambridge, an MSc in Science Communication from Imperial College London, and is currently studying towards a degree in English Literature at Birkbeck College London.

Stephen Rowland is Professor of Higher Education at University College London. He has taught in primary schools from 1975-1985. His first book, The Enquiring Classroom (Falmer Press, 1985), described and analysed how children's intellegence manifests itself in a classroom setting where the opportunities for freedom of choice are maximised. He went on to Sheffield University where he was involved in the professional development of school teachers. His research into this development led to The Enquiring Tutor (Falmer Press, 1994). He His latest book is The Enquiring University (McGraw Hill 2006).

Bertram Schefold is Professor of Economics at the University of Frankfurt. Previously, he held posts at the University of Basel, Trinity College Cambridge, and Harvard University. Much of his research has focussed on the mathematical reconstruction of the classical theory of prices, distribution, and employment. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Tubingen and Università degli studi di Macerata in Italy. Since 1995 he is Chairman of the Stefan-George Society.

Ronald de Sousa is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was educated in Switzerland, France, England and the USA. He has lived and taught in Toronto since 1966, with only temporary interruptions for visiting appointments elsewhere in Canada, in the US, the UK, Switzerland, and China. He is the author of The Rationality of Emotion (MIT 1987) and Évolution et rationalité (PUF 2004), of which a revised English version, Why Think:? Evolution and the Rational Mind, is expected in May 2007. His current research interests focus on emotions, evolutionary theory, cognitive science, sex, and the puzzle of religious belief.