Project Personnel

Prof. Dr. Cyril Levitt

Prof. Dr. Cyril Levitt is the Director of the Lawrence Krader Research Project, a professor in the Department of Sociology and one of the department's past chairs. He worked with Lawrence Krader from 1969 until the latter’s death in 1998, writing his doctoral dissertation under Krader’s supervision at the Institut für Ethnologie at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has edited and published two of Krader’s unpublished manuscripts as books: Labor and Value (with Rod Hay) 2002 and Noetics: The Science of Thinking and Knowing (2010). Along with Dr. Sabine Sander he organized a conference on Krader’s works at McMaster University in 2016 and in conjunction with Prof. Rob Beamish is organizing another conference on the theme: Universalism and Particularism in the Contemporary World: Philosophical, Anthropological, Theological, Aesthetic and Political-Economic Dimensions at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario May 5th and 6th 2020. With Sabine Sander he edited revised papers from the first conference which were published by Peter Lang Publishers in New York (2018) under the title: Beyond the Juxtaposition of Nature and Culture: Lawrence Krader, Interdisciplinarity and the Concept of the Human Being. Prof. Levitt is currently preparing an English translation of Krader’s last major publication Die Anfänge des Kapitalismus in Mitteleuropa [The Beginnings of Capitalism in Central Europe] and is editing Krader’s manuscript Myth and Ideology, both to be published by Peter Lang Publishers in New York in 2020. Prof. Levitt has published many books and articles on several topics in sociology and anthropology and is the editor of Hostile and Malignant Prejudice: Psychoanalytic Approaches. London: Karnac Publishers, 2014, a collection of papers by members of the former Committee on Prejudice (Including Antisemitism) of the International Psychoanalytical Association of which he was chair. Prof. Levitt is also a psychoanalyst in private practice in Toronto.

 

Sabine Sander

Sabine Sander is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at McMaster University, working on the Lawrence Krader Research Project. She teaches Cultural Studies and Philosophy at the University of Koblenz-Landau (Germany). From 2008 to 2014 she worked on a German-Israeli research Project on linguistic, social and cultural theories in the German-Jewish context at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt and at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, Israel. She was also a researcher in the DFG Research Project Religious Individualization in Historical Perspective at the Max Weber Center. Her interests include the history of ideas, cultural, social and linguistic theories, aesthetics, anthropology, and sociology of knowledge. Along with various articles in English and German, she is author of Dialogische Verantwortung. Konzepte der Vermittlung und des Fremdverstehens im jüdisch-deutschen Kontext des 19. Und 20. Jahrhunderts (2017) for which she was awarded the Max Weber Award. She received her PhD in Cultural Studies published as a book: Der Topos der Undarstellbarkeit. Ästhetische Konzepte nach Adorno und Lyotard and is the editor of Language as Bridge and Border (2015); together with Cyril Levitt she is the co-editor of Beyond the Juxtaposition of Nature and Culture (2018).

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