CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now with Iris Blake (AMST) and Lisa Cassell (PHIL)

The Dresher Center’s CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now lunchtime series showcases exciting new work in the humanities in a dynamic and inter-disciplinary setting.

Register in advance for lunch while supplies last

Iris Blake, Assistant Teaching Professor, American Studies
Summer 2026 Dresher Center Fellow

Feedback as Method: Listening to Sound Art through a Feminist Disability Studies Lens

Iris Blake’s scholarship interrogates how coloniality has shaped knowledge about the voice and analyzes contemporary multimedia works that engage sound installation, visual art, and performance as alternative archives for voicing and listening. Their first book project, Undisciplining the Voice, argues that aligning voice with sound and the human has been central to the colonial project of modernity. Drawing on new research completed at the Walker Art Center in May of this year, this talk analyzes Christine Sun Kim’s interactive sound work, Game of Skill 3.0 (2026), as a point of departure to discuss her book project’s engagement with feedback, vibration, echo, and the multisensory in relation to practices of voicing and listening. Theorizing through their shifting relationship to hearing over the course of writing – from hearing to hard of hearing – Blake will discuss how they have been revisiting and relistening to sound-based works through a feminist disability studies lens.

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Lisa Cassell, Assistant Professor, Philosophy
Summer 2026 Dresher Center Fellow

Bayesianism with an Even More Human Face

Bayesian epistemology is often understood as providing a logic of reasoning. This characterization, however, raises an important question: Why regard Bayesianism as a logic when it lacks what is commonly taken to be logic’s defining feature—the relation of logical consequence? In this talk, Lisa Cassell briefly describes how a methodology traditionally employed to defend the normativity of logic can be extended not only to establish Bayesianism as a genuine logic, but also to argue that it is more foundational than logics defined in terms of the consequence relation. While Richard Jeffrey famously described his version of Bayesianism as having a “human face”, Cassell argues that the methodology underpinning the Bayesian framework as a logic reflects an even more fundamental form of humanism.

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