18th Annual Nicos Poulantzas Memorial Lecture
Friday, 19 December 2025, 7 p.m.
Goethe Institute Auditorium, Omirou 14–16, Athens
Eduardo Cadava
Philip Mayhew Professor of English, Princeton University
Training History to Read: Fazal Sheikh’s Erasure Trilogy
This talk takes its point of departure from Fazal Sheikh’s multi-volume photographic project on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, The Erasure Trilogy (2015). Exploring the legacies of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, this project imagines the possibility of exposing and opposing the various processes of erasure that, over the last several decades, have sought to erase both the violence of this history and the acts of erasure themselves. Evoking writings by, among others, Walter Benjamin, Mahmoud Darwish, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Eyal Weizman, the talk will argue that the project is a training manual on how to read historically in moments of danger and therefore a precious and essential resource in engaging, analyzing, and countering the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Eduardo Cadava is Philip Mayhew Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Emerson and the Climates of History, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (the Greek edition of this book has been published by Nissos under the title Λέξεις φωτός: Θέσεις για τη φωτογραφία της ιστορίας), Paper Graveyards (soon to appear with Crete University Press in its Greek edition, Χαρτιά κοιμητήρια), and, with Sara Nadal-Melsió, Politically Red. He also has co-edited Who Comes After the Subject?, Cities Without Citizens, and The Itinerant Languages of Photography. He is presently writing a book on Fazal Sheikh’s Erasure Trilogy entitled Erasures and a book on Derrida and Palestine entitled “What Interests Me Has Always Had Its Place There”: Derrida on Palestine.
The speaker will be introduced by Mina Karavanta, Associate Professor of Literary Theory, Cultural Studies and Anglophone Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
The event will be opened by Maria Repoussi, Historian and Director of the Nicos Poulantzas Institute.
© Fazal Sheikh, from The Conflict Shoreline, Steidl, 2015
