Social life is framed (and re-directed) increasingly not just by institutions and processes but by events. Recent theorizing of events in philosophy, history, anthropology, political theory, and sociology discuss their qualities of rupture,surprise, and incomprehension, the way events elude the present, act as turning points, require recognition by subjects, and prompt the appearance, focusing or reconstitution of individual subjects themselves. Indeed events are shape-shifters, now appearing as letters and treaties, now paintings and maps, now political constitutions, now handshakes etc. In this course we will rethink and reconceptualize ‘event’, its deployment of performatives, its actors and publics as a key political and sociological category that illuminates the understanding both our present and our future. The readings will include Alain Badiou, William Sewell, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Reinhart Koselleck and others.