This event marks the launch of two new books by Professor Brad Evans from the Department of Politics, Languages & Interntional Studies at the University of Bath. Author of many books and articles, he has recently published The Atrocity Exhibition and Violence: Human in Dark Times.

The Atrocity Exhibition has just been published by the Los Angeles Review of Books and features a collection of essays spanning over a decade and covers many of the key areas of Brad Evans's thinking on violence. Selected to launch the new Los Angeles Review of Books Provocations series, it deals with what Brad terms 'Life in the Age of Total Violence', addressing the multiple ways violence appears to us in the world.

With introductions from Russell Brand and Henry A Giroux, the book also features a number of co-written pieces and interviews, including with Simon Critchley, Adrian Parr, Julian Reid, Michael Hardt, along with Brand and Giroux.

Violence: Human in Dark Times features a series of penetrating conversations in which Brad Evans along with Natasha Lennard talk with a wide range of cutting-edge thinkers, including Oliver Stone, Simon Critchley, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, to explore the role of violence in politics, culture, the media, public speech, and against the environment.

First published in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books, these lively, in-depth exchanges among historians, theorists, and artists offer a timely and bracing look at how the increasing expression and acceptance of violence, in all strata of society, has become a defining feature of our times.

Speaker profiles

Professor Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist and writer, whose work specialises on the problem of violence. The author of some ten books and edited volumes, along with over fifty academic and media articles, he currently holds a Chair in Political Violence & Aesthetics at the University of Bath.

Throughout 2015-2017, Brad was personally invited to lead a dedicated series for The New York Times (The Stone) on violence. He is currently the lead editor for The Los Angeles Review of Books section on violence and the arts/critical theory. Brad's Portraits of Violence book recently won a prestigious Independent Publishers Award (Graphic Novel, 2018). His works are currently being translated into many languages including, Spanish, Italian, German, Turkish, Finnish, Indonesian and Korean.