2025 Session

In an intensive six-week course of study, faculty members, graduate students and independent scholars from around the world, in the humanities and social sciences, explore recent developments in critical theory. 

Participants work with the SCT’s core faculty of distinguished scholars and theorists in one of four six-week seminars. Each faculty member offers, in addition, a public lecture and a colloquium (based on an original paper) which are attended by the entire group.

The program also includes practical Writing and Studio Art Workshops taught by a writer and artist who will visit for shorter periods. Finally, the program begins with a panel discussion between the SCT Director and a leading figure in the Humanities and ends with an exciting two-day conference. In addition, Cornell offers participants the resources of one of the great research libraries in the United States.

The 2025 summer session at the School of Criticism and Theory will be held in-person in Ithaca, June 8 - July 17, 2025.

Six-Week Seminars:

Six-Week Seminars

	Fadi A. Bardawil  Associate Professor, The Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University "The Terms of Violence" Profile
	Patrick Jagoda  William Rainey Harper Professor in the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, English, and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Chicago "Practices of Play, Theories of Freedom" Profile
	Naveeda Khan  Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology; Affiliate Faculty, Comparative Thought and Literature, and Environmental Science and Studies, Johns Hopkins University "An Aesthetics for the End" Profile
	Autumn M. Womack  Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies & Department of English, Princeton University "Black Art/Black Living" Profile

Two-Week Workshops:

Six-Week Seminars

	Paul Ramirez Jonas   Professor and Chair of the Department of Art, Cornell University "To Publish is to Make Publics" Profile
	Marion Wrenn  Executive Director of Writing; Senior Lecturer of Writing and Affiliate Faculty in Literature and Creative Writing, NYU Abu Dhabi "Reading like a Writer, Writing like a Scholar: Voice, Audience, and AI" Profile

Panel Discussion:

Six-Week Seminars

	Durba Ghosh    Professor, Department of History; Director of the Society for Humanities, Cornell University "What should we preserve of the past?: theories of coloniality in a critical spirit" Profile
	Carolyn Rouse  Ritter Professor of Anthropology, Princeton University; Director, School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University "What should we preserve of the past?: theories of coloniality in a critical spirit" Profile

Six-Week Seminars:

The Terms of Violence 

Fadi A. Bardawil 

Associate Professor, The Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University

Today, violence is more and more ubiquitous, both as an experience and a concept. It is difficult to even begin to articulate sets of examples that illustrate how widespread its different uses have become. Where does one begin? With the warnings about violent content in the books we teach, with police violence or with the unfathomable mass violence of the livestreamed war on Gaza and Israel’s noncompliance with the World Court’s order to prevent acts of genocide against Palestinians? The ubiquity of the concept has come hand in hand with its stretching by critical thinkers and militants to encompass multiple scales, temporalities, agents, modalities, and ends of violence. This is perhaps best illustrated in how its conceptual articulation is very often preceded by qualifiers. Here are just a few illustrations: micro-violence, ordinary violence, sexual violence, systemic violence, slow violence, terrorist violence, liberatory violence, religious violence, colonial violence, state violence, domestic violence,

Our time together will be dedicated to reading works from different traditions of critical intellectual inquiry – anti-colonial and decolonial theory, contemporary Arab thought, western critical theory, political theory, and anthropology – which explore the question of violence. We will pursue together the exploration of how the stretching of the concept leaves its marks on thinking the terms (language, temporalities, scales, conditions) of violence. In doing so, we will pay a close attention to the complex, and, at times intimate, relations it entertains with a host of key concepts such as power, law, revolution, hegemony, war and non-violence. Last, but not least, my wager is that in thinking together, during these times of calamity and adversity, we can begin to achieve some conceptual clarity on a fundamental dimension of our increasingly interconnected, yet fragmented, world

Practices of Play, Theories of Freedom

Patrick Jagoda

William Rainey Harper Professor in the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, English, and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Chicago 

In humanistic discussions about aesthetics and culture, play has long been associated with freedom. In the eighteenth century, Friedrich Schiller already connected play and freedom through his concept of the “play drive” (Spieltrieb) that enables "free play." By the twentieth century, in Homo Ludens (1938), Johan Huizinga still maintains that play, which is "older than culture,” is a “voluntary activity” and the foundation of our freedom. Even beyond humanistic scholarship, in the early twenty-first century, journalists and gamers alike characterize the play that takes place in open world video games as offering increasingly greater degrees of freedom.

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the complex interface between play and freedom. The first of these terms, play, provides numerous conceptual genealogies. While practices of play may seem lacking in seriousness and therefore distant from critical theory, the term recurs across numerous theoretical approaches. We find discussions of play in psychoanalytic theory (Sigmund Freud on the pleasure principle or D.W. Winnicott on play and child development), Marxist theory (Bernard Suits on the “lusory attitude” of utopia or McKenzie Wark on “gamer theory”), structuralist and poststructuralist theory (Jacques Ehrmann on play in literature and philosophy or Jacques Derrida on “freeplay”), gender theory (Iris Marion Young on “throwing like a girl” or Mary Flanagan on “critical play” and “playing house”), critical race theory (Kyra Gaunt on “the games Black girls play” or Saidiya Hartman on entanglements of pleasure and terror in play that seems innocent), queer theory (Jack Halberstam on the “queer art of failure” as a disruption of heteronormative pleasures or Bo Ruberg on “queer games”), and of course game studies itself (Roger Caillois on “ludus and paidia” or Aaron Trammell on “repairing play”). When brought into conversation with play, the second key concept of freedom raises questions about free play (Friedrich Schiller), improvisation (George Lewis or Fred Moten), control and freedom in computational media (Gilles Deleuze or Wendy Chun), limits of play in social media technologies (Alexander Galloway or Whitney Phillips), and the conceptual ambivalences of freedom that often lead away from play (Maggie Nelson).

Our theoretical readings will approach the entanglement of play and freedom in a variety of ways. As often as possible, we will pair theory with practice, making, design, and other playful methodologies. Since the rise of video games as a major culture industry in the late twentieth century, there has been more discussion of choice than of freedom in games. Yet contemporary gameplay may still open up generative ways of thinking about freedom. For this reason, to both inhabit and disrupt varied phenomenologies of play, we are sure to play at least a few games (both analog and digital) together. We might even approach processes of design to think about what we can learn, via “critical making” or experimentation, when we create a game or a playful experience. In these ways, we will test Brian Massumi's contention that "freedom is not chosen: it is invented."

An Aesthetics for the End

Naveeda Khan

Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology; Affiliate Faculty, Comparative Thought and Literature, and Environmental Science and Studies, Johns Hopkins University

Whether we’re talking about climate change, genocide, nuclear war, or millenarianism, there tends to be an assumption that the end of the world is something extraordinary - a leap out of the everyday we currently inhabit.  This is followed by the claim that we have no language or genre by which to express this end and must invent.   Yet these assumptions are contestable.  When we look more closely at our current forms of life, we find an aesthetics of the end embedded within them.  It is through our discourses, gestures, affects, even silences, by which we enact various ends and cuts in ordinary life.  But the central knot of envisioning the end as such is that of course it cannot be experienced, making these ordinary endings suffused with denial and elaborate claims of infinity, melancholia over the limits of knowledge, extensions of perception and exertions of prophesying.  This seminar will explore the central tension between the assumption that the end must be extraordinary and simultaneously that the end cannot be fully experienced through articulations, signs, traces, and aesthetic forms that are present in the ordinary and our ecologies.  It will combine a recent spate of meditative writings on the end of the world or worlds, notably Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, David Scott’s Irreparable Evil: An Essay in Moral and Reparatory History and Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s The Ends of the World, with ethnographies that explore various ends (of an political system, kinship, or a habitable world), specifically: Alexei Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, Stefania Pandalfo’s Impasse of Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory and Adriana Petryna’s Horizonwork: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change to explore how such an aesthetics of the end finds expression within the ordinary and even risks unintelligibility, or madness, in calling back a world in retreat.  We will end by reading Èdouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation for its hopeful perspectives on traversing such abysses. 

Black Art/Black Living 

Autumn M. Womack 

Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies & Department of English, Princeton University

When Zora Neale Hurston asserted that Black cultural life was “still in the making, a new kind is crowding out the old” she articulated a deceptively challenging premise: Black cultural production (literary, sonic, visual, embodied) is not, as some would have it, a calcified object of knowledge or an indexical modality. Instead, it is always unfolding, developing, and keeping pace with the dynamic movement of Black life itself. At the very same time, Hurston’s phrasing houses an equally urgent question about the dynamic interplay between form and theory. What, she seems to ask, is the relationship between expressive form and a theory of Black life that takes aliveness as its starting point? 

Certainly, Hurston is not the only Black artist to wrestle with this dynamic. In one sense we might say that the dynamic between living and art, or what Leigh Raiford describes as movement and medium, has always animated Black cultural production. And, in recent years, the dynamic interplay between Black living and Black art has animated a vibrant body of scholarship of critics like Kevin Quashie, Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, and Stephen Best, as well as visual artists like Garrett Bradley, Khalil Josephs, and Arthur Jafa. This seminar will explore how, across time, Black artistic production has worked to theorize the relationship between art and living. We will contend with the ways in which the interplay between Black art and living generates and demands aesthetic and formal experimentation. 

Workshops:

To Publish is to Make Publics

Paul Ramirez Jonas 

Professor and Chair of the Department of Art, Cornell University

Paper size standards determine the sizes of the sheets of paper we use as printed matter: tabloid, letter, postcard, currency, business card, admission ticket. Each is a subdivision or multiple of the other. Beyond their measurements each of these formats implies the potential of printed media to insert itself in the continuum between public and private modes of address. Each format is also associated with different forms of circulation: posting, delivering by hand, mailing, leafleting, and that in itself implicates different kinds of publics. This workshop will explore writing and designing into these formats, as we play with their intended publics and forms of distribution. This is also a hands on production workshop, we will learn how to use a Risography, a form of offset printing, to make high volume editions your explorations. 

Reading like a Writer, Writing like a Scholar: Voice, Audience, and AI

Marion Wrenn

Executive Director of Writing; Senior Lecturer of Writing and Affiliate Faculty in Literature and Creative Writing, NYU Abu Dhabi

The algorithms of generative AI make it appear as if our laptops are thinking for us and writing effortlessly on their own. What this illusion obscures is the value of the slower, messier human work that goes into crafting powerful prose. This workshop will focus on the backstage work of creating writing that holds a reader’s attention and lingers in the mind. By focusing on the craft of writing -- and by reading texts from a range of disciplines for their exemplary craftsmanship– we’ll explore why every writer needs a reader and every writer needs to read. By drawing on your knowledge of your discipline, our work will both demystify the craft of academic writing and reinvigorate your writing practice. We will investigate and experiment with a range of reading and writing strategies designed to help you deepen your relationship with writing as a form of discovery, creativity, analysis and craft.  

Fadi Bardawil "The Terms of Violence"

Patrick Jagoda "Practices of Play, Theories of Freedom"

Naveeda Khan "An Aesthetics for the End"

Autumn M. Womack "Black Art/Black Living"

Paul Ramirez Jonas "To Publish is to Make Publics"

Marion Wrenn "Reading like a Writer, Writing like a Scholar: Voice, Audience, and AI"

Click here for the 2025 Brochure

The online application portal will close on the deadline of February 2, 2025.

Learn more and apply for the 2025 Summer Session here.