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As the new Director of the School of Criticism and Theory, I want to express my deep excitement about this thrilling new responsibility. For over fifty years, SCT has posed the most fundamental questions about language, politics, society, and art. I can’t wait to welcome a new cohort of scholars to grapple with the ideas…
One of the first humanities centers in the nation, Cornell's Society for the Humanities is SCT’s new parent organization. This summer it hosted 100 scholars to celebrate 60 years of innovative thought and scholarship.
Distinguished Professor of Political Theory at the CUNY Graduate Center and Professor Emerita of Government at Cornell, Buck-Morss explores the relationship between Haiti, France, and their respective revolutions in Hegel’s thought.
The School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, a six-week summer program that serves as a hub for interdisciplinary inquiry in the humanities and social sciences, celebrated its 50th anniversary with events June 16-17.
The Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard University, Peter Gordon talks about his most recent book, Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver (2026), published by Yale University Press.
Carolyn Rouse asks fellow anthropologists how we can manage the unmanageable while laying the foundation for a better future.
Jonathan Culler, the Class of 1916 Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell, is recognized by the International Society for the Study of Narrative Literature for decades of influential work on theory and criticism, which has been translated into more than 25 languages.
Coming from the University of Toronto, where he was the director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, Loewen began his five-year appointment as the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Aug. 1.
I had the honor of being named the new director of Cornell University’s School of Criticism and Theory earlier this year. SCT is approaching its 50th anniversary and the mission is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago. Attending the 2023 end-of-summer banquet, it was thrilling to see so many young scholars committed…
Professor Anthony Vidler, whose passing last week we deeply mourn, offered a wonderful mini-seminar and public lecture at SCT in the summer of 2017. The lecture was entitled "The Smooth and the Rough: Surfaces Psychological and Architectural from Adrian Stokes to Rem Koolhaas" and introduced by former Cornell Provost Don Randel. The lecture and public…
From its inception, almost half a century ago, SCT has played an important role as an annual scholarly and intellectual platform on which the drama of the somewhat fruitless theory wars and the questionable virtue of vain polemics is resolutely sidestepped. Instead a climate of rigorous investigations and courteous debate of “themes out of school,”…
Listen to SCT 2023 Faculty Martin Hägglund discuss 'Coming to Terms with Human Finitude' on the What's Left of Philosophy Podcast
We are thrilled to share 2023 Faculty, Dianne M. Stweart's new book, Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad: Africana Nations and the Power of Black Sacred Imagination, Volume II, Orisa
On Cornell’s eighth Giving Day, held March 16, 15,905 alumni, students, faculty, staff, parents and friends from more than 80 countries made gifts totaling a record-breaking $12,268,629.
Gifts allow the College to fulfill its mission: preparing students to do the greatest good in the world.
Read upcoming 2022 SCT faculty, Amy Allen's most recent publication, Critique on the Couch: Why Critical Theory Needs Psychoanalysis
"As a participant/observer, I am offering a narrative about the evolution of Title IX from 1972 to early 2021. I have three lessons. First—and who can disagree?—sex discrimination is one of the brute enforcers of patriarchal gender systems. ... Second, as Title IX evolved, a feminist consensus about it cracked in several places. ... Third,…
With a Foreword by Judith Butler and edited by Kimberley Ducey, Clevis Headley and Joe R Feagin, this book is published by Rowman and Littlefield - please click here to read more about this important work.
We are thrilled to join Oscar Jansson and David LaRocca in celebrating their new book with Bloomsbury Academic, The Geschlecht Complex: New and Selected Essays on Gender, Genre, and Ontology, which grew out of an SCT seminar in 2017. Thank you to Oscar and David for sharing a few words with us below:
SCT 2021 Faculty, George Yancy, aims to engage philosophy within more expansive public contexts. In his newest article at Truthout, he interviews Historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, the author of an award-winning article, “The Etymology of [N-Word]: Resistance, Language and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North,” and a 2016 monograph entitled Colored Travelers: Mobility…
Join Heather Love, SCT Senior Fellow and 2020-2021 lecturer, to discuss the upcoming release of her book from Chicago University Press: “Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory.”
Funerals, burials and other ways of communally commemorating those who have died have always been part of human history. The need for social distancing has upended these psychologically important rituals and fostered creative alternatives.
The financial crisis in higher education hurts all of us, writes Caroline Levine, in an Inside Higher Ed op-ed. There’s one clear solution, she says.
Join Anita Allen's Seminar at Princeton Research, in collaboration with the Center for Information and Technology Policy, for a survey of "issues and concerns at the intersection of race relations and privacy — values and rights. Who gets to be shielded or secluded? Who gets watched; gets to observe? Who gets profiled, who ignored? Who…
“What drives the current rift between white and Black America, and how as individuals can we effectively contribute to the fight against the worldmaking of whiteness?”