Program on Human Rights Collaboratory: Cultural Heritage - The biopolitics of human rights

The Program on Human Rights Collaboratory Series is an interdisciplinary investigation of human rights in the humanities. It is funded under the Stanford Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies as the third in a sequence of pursuing peace and security, improving governance and advancing well-being.

Pheng Cheah is professor of rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Harvard University Press, 2006) and Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (Columbia University Press, 2003), and the co-editor of several book collections, including Derrida and the Time of the Political (Duke University Press, 2009), Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (Routledge, 2003) and Cosmopolitics - Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (University of Minnesota Press, 1998).  He is currently completing a  book on theories of the world and world literature from the postcolonial South in an era of global financialization.  Also in progress is a book on globalization and world cinema from the three Chinas, focusing on the films of Jia Zhangke, Tsai Ming-liang and Fruit Chan.