Gregg Lambert

Lambert earned a bachelor's degree in English, with a minor in Religion, from Pacific University in 1983 and an MA in English and Creative Writing from Portland State University in 1984.[1] Between 1984 and 1987, Lambert was a Fellow in the Center for Hermeneutic Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, where he completed a Masters program in Theology and Literature, and graduate studies in French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory from the University of California at Irvine under the direction of the late-French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

In 1996, Lambert joined the Department of English at Syracuse University and was later appointed as Chair between 2005 and 2008, before leaving the department to become the founding director of the Syracuse University Humanities Center.[2] Since 2008, Lambert was also Principal Investigator of the Central New York Humanities Corridor.[3] In 2013 he established the permanent endowment of the CNY Humanities Corridor from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,endowment announcement and was elected as a member of the International Advisory Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes.[4]

Consisting of several books and edited volumes, Lambert's published work covers a wide range of disciplines and topics, including the history of literary criticism and theory, contemporary continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, issues in the general Humanities and contemporary academic institutions. He has also published over fifty articles in peer reviewed journals in several different fields, encyclopedias, textbooks and collected volumes. Lambert's writings have been translated into Chinese, French, Korean, Japanese, Norwegian, and other languages. Lambert is co-editor of the academic journal Deleuze Studies (University of Edinburgh Press).[5]

Lambert is a noted optimist about the future of the humanities.[6] Even though he admits that the humanities have taken their share of hits in recent years, like cuts in funding and an increasing emphasis on science and technology within society and the academy, Lambert is optimistic about the future of the humanities. In his view, the supposed 'crisis in the humanities' is primarily a media hyperbole, which has nothing to do with the real situation in the humanities today. Several of his projects actively perform his main argument for the vitality of the contemporary humanities, which centers around the idea that “the academy is providing opportunities for humanities students to cope with the new paradigm of globalization”.[7]

As Co-Founder of The Perpetual Peace Project,[8] a partnership between the European Union National Institutes of Culture (EUNIC), the International Peace Institute (IPI), the United Nations University, Slought Foundation, Syracuse University, Utrecht University, and the Treaty of Utrecht Foundation, Lambert is engaged in bringing together theorists and practitioners in revisiting 21st century prospects for international peace, on the basis of Immanuel Kant's foundational essay "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch" (1795).[9] He is the producer of a film by the same name, which consists of a series of short videos of several philosophers, sociologists, and diplomats speaking about peace.[10] Lambert also served on the Advisory Board of the Histories of Violence project.[11] His recent book on the subject Philosophy after Friendship: Deleuze's Conceptual Personae (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) deals with the failure of friendship in the history of political philosophy through a critical investigation of its major "conceptual personae" (Deleuze): the friend, the enemy, the stranger, the migrant, and the refugee or survivor.