Paul Breines, associate professor of history, discusses the experience of being an atheist, a Jew, and a bisexual as a faculty member at Boston College, a Catholic institution. The lecture is part of the “Last Lecture Series,” in which, a distinguished faculty member addresses the question: “If you had the chance to give the last lecture of your life, what would you say?”
Professor Breines regularly teaches courses in modern European intellectual history. His main interests are in Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche (especially), and Freud, and in 20th century reworkings of these "master thinkers" by neo-Marxists, existentialists, post-structuralists, feminists and "queer theorists." His graduate courses have included: recent currents in intellectual history; Nietzsche and Foucault; postmoderism; and "queer theory and history." Graduate students with whom he works are engaged in doctoral studies of women in French Fascism; Italian feminism, 1945-1995; intellectual history and "the linguistic turn"; Marx's concept of progress; fashion and British imperialism in Africa; the impact of the Frankfurt School in the U.S; the political and cultural consequences of German Romanticism's images of India; and German feminism.