2026 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 three 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 optional shorter workshops taught by international correspondent Deborah Amos and interdisciplinary artist Carla Liesching. The program begins with a lecture by leading political theorist, Alexander Livingston, along with a 50th anniversary conference organized by distinguished scholars and leader of SCT, and ends with a two-day, participant-led conference.  In addition, Cornell offers participants the resources of one of the great research libraries in the United States.

The 2026 summer session at the School of Criticism and Theory will be held in-person in Ithaca, June 8 - July 16, 2026.

Six-Week Seminars:

Six-Week Seminars

	Jason Frank John L Senior Professor of Government, Cornell University "Democratic Theories of Counterrevolution" Profile
	William Mazzarella Neukom Family Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago "Charisma: Eros/Thanatos" Profile
	Chi-ming Yang Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania "Orientalism/Capitalism" Profile

Optional Workshops:

Optional Workshops

	Deborah Amos  Ferris Professor of Journalism in Residence, Princeton University "Human Rights Reporting" Profile
	Carla Liesching  Lecture in Lens-Based Media, Department of Art, Cornell University "Unmaking the Archive" Profile

Opening Lecture:

Opening Lecture 

	Alexander Livingston   Associate Professor of Government,  Cornell University  "Prophetic Witness and the Democratic Imagination" Profile

Six-Week Seminars:

Professor William Mazzarella, University of Chicago

“Charisma: Eros/Thanatos”

Everyone knows what charisma feels like – but who can explain it? And what are we to make of its constitutive moral ambiguity? Charisma appears as sacred grace, as inspiration, and as erotic love – but also as the hypnotic evil that leads millions to murder. Charisma sits awkwardly amid the rationalities of secular social theory. And yet it’s a commonplace to suppose that some kind of enthusiasm or effervescence, some kind of surplus fascination is a necessary condition of social life. This seminar interleaves psychoanalysis, sociology, theology, and political theory to help us make sense of charisma as a pharmakon of social life: at once life and death, eros and thanatos.  

Professor Chi-ming Yang, University of Pennsylvania

“Orientalism / Capitalism"

This seminar puts into conversation two analytics of empire that are not often brought together, Orientalism and Capitalism. How can key contributions of Edward Said and Karl Marx be extended to address current ecologies of dispossession, migration, survivance? While historically neither Orientalism scholarship nor Marxian thought has centered the natural world, a third term—the Environment—will help us to study the imbrications, limitations, tensions, and continuing relevance of these methods, particularly in an unprecedented moment of genocide and corporate land theft. Said was a theorist of colonial occupations, of exile and human geography. In Orientalism, he laid bare an ideological apparatus of Western knowledge formation, which provoked a sustained inquiry into the politics of cultural production, including the manner in which presumptions of East-West ontological difference undergird government policies and the rule of experts in, over, and beyond academic institutions. Let us, as Naomi Klein proposed in 2016, “[read] Said in a warming world,”[i] and consider legacies of both orientalism and capitalism within the framework of green colonialism and the racialized production of space.

Our seminar readings will span environmental studies, comparative race and colonialism, and political economy, with emphasis on recent work in legal and environmental orientalism and eco-Marxism (Diana K. Kavis, Rabea Eghbariah, John Bellamy Foster, Andreas Malm). We will contextualize Marx’s writings on primitive accumulation, metabolic rift, Atlantic slavery, Oriental despotism, and the Asiatic Mode of Production (AMP). Selected case studies demonstrate how imagined geographies are realized in the shaping and (re)possession of land, infrastructure, and real estate, including the plantationocene (Anna Tsing, Tania Li, Patrick Wolfe, Kareem Rabie).

Attending to histories of racial capitalism also brings to light Black-Asian-Native solidarities (Cedric Robinson, Iyko Day, Lisa Lowe, Audra Simpson, Tao Leigh Goffe); while abolitionist critiques of structural racism (Angela Davis, Robin D.G. Kelley) and new directions in Animal Studies (Sharon Holland, Zakkiyah Iman Jackson) will guide our discussion of entangled East-West histories and ecological kinships formed in opposition to anthropocentrism. Here, Indigenous, feminist approaches are critical to “rethinking the ontological exceptionality of the human,” to borrow from ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose. 

Workshops: Details Pending 

Click here for the 2026 Brochure

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

Learn more and apply for the 2025 Summer Session here.