Michel Foucault and the Body. Questioning the Paradoxes of Juridical and Political Inscriptions

Please register your interest to attend either in person or virtually the IAS Lecture Series Michel Foucault and the Body. Questioning the Paradoxes of Juridical and Political Inscriptions to be held at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK on 16 – 17 September 2022. 

Please visit our event’s website for more information: 

Registration link: 

This event brings together an international panel of researchers from the UK, France and Italy to discuss the phenomenon of judicial tattooing. The aim is to create a rich and intellectually stimulating debate on various bodily inscriptions, and especially to question the body as a site for visual punishment as well as the marks and signs of political coercion. If the French philosopher historian Michel Foucault (1926-1984) suggested that the human body could be understood as a ‘surface of inscription’ of past and current systems of political power, making the body a legible object in the study of history (Foucault: 1970, 1975), there is a history to be told of those practices of marking, registering, and inscribing the body, especially also in light of new surveillance technologies. 

Our speaker include: 

• Professor Gianmaria Ajani (Rector of the University of Turin, Italy), working at the intersection of art and law
• Dr Tim Peters (Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia, working at the interdisciplinary intersection of legal theory, theology and popular culture)
• Dr Sabine Mödersheim (Associate Professor at University Wisconsin-Madison, US), working on German and European emblem tradition and visual culture, the use of images in architectural decorations, popular culture and propaganda
• Dr Zoe Alker (Lecturer in Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Liverpool, UK), former investigator of the Digital Panopticon and working on histories of crime and justice in the nineteenth century
• Dr Anne Chassagnol (Senior Lecturer in Anglophone Studies at the University of Paris 8, France), interested in the history of art, Victorian Studies and graphic novels

The event is organised by Dr Valérie Hayaert (EUTOPIA SIF/Marie Sklodowska-Curie COFUND Fellow) and Dr Melissa Pawelski (IAS Early Career Fellow) and will be held in a hybrid format in OC1.06 and on MS Teams. Registration and attendance are free of charge, and you will be sent the link to join the meeting closer to the day. 

Any question, please email us at melissa.pawelski@warwick.ac.uk or Valerie.hayaert@warwick.ac.uk