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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.
2024 SCT is organized around four seminars led by renowned senior scholars. The scholars this summer come from the fields of Literature, Philosophy, Anthropology, and Environmental Studies. The seminars will focus on critical topics related to the environment, epistemology, race, property, futurism, politics, and the body. In addition to the 6-week seminars, SCT is introducing workshops in poetry, narrative non-fiction, and analytical writing led by two dynamic writer/scholars. Capping our seminars will be a conference highlighting the original work of some of the students and faculty.
SCT commemorates Anthony Vidler(1941-2023), historian, theorist, critic and educator who offered a wonderful SCT mini-seminar and public lecture in the summer of 2017.
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 SCT Faculty, Dianne M. Stewart's new book, as well as announce her 6-week major seminar topic for 2023's summer session: "The Ties that Bind: Global Black Feminisms and Womanisms"
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"Amy Allen works with many of the central authors in the field of critical theory to make the case for psychoanalysis, the analytic potential of the death drive, and the importance of retaining the notion of the...
"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, I have...
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. The book can be ordered here: George Yancy: A Critical Introduction.
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:"As one indication among many of the...
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.”With Underdogs, Heather Love shows that queer theorists inherited as much from sociologists as they did from activists. Through theoretical and archival work, Love...
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...
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...
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.In 2019, before any of us had heard of Covid-19, Anthropologist and SCT 2020-21 Faculty, Matthew Engelke...
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."Soaring tuition and crushing student debt have risen faster than inflation for decades," Levine writes in the piece. "Then came coronavirus, which has prompted massive college layoffs. The higher...
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 gets to be...
SCT Senior Fellow, Faculty and 2021 lecturer, Anita Allen, will participate in a virtual panel discussion as part of the UPenn Paideia Program's preceptorial, "Racism and Anti-Racism in Contemporary America." The unique series of 13 interdisciplinary conversations among leading scholars and practitioners drawn from a wide range of fields will...
Join the Center for Jewish Studies at City University of New York on November 19, 2020, for a conversation with SCT 2021-21 Faculty Marina Rustow and Arnold Franklin on Rustow's new book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020)Date & TimeNovember 19, 20205:00 pm - 6:30 pmLearn more...
“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?”In the longest public interview he has ever given, SCT Faculty George Yancy argues that “white supremacy breathes at the site of Black asphyxiation.” Yancy, who in the summer of...
Literary theorist and legal scholar, Stanley Fish, discusses the case of Trump v. Bolton, the Twitter bully pulpit, the era of fake news and deep fakes, and the possibility that speech may be too free.“Donald Trump’s sneering attitude toward freedom of speech has been a feature, not a bug, since long before he descended the golden escalator....
Dear SCT Community,We write to you in a moment of profound societal transformation in the United States—to stand in unreserved, if humbled, solidarity with the powerful organizing that is unfolding in seen and unseen ways in defense of Black lives. We are grateful for the direct and decisive calls to action by the leaders of this movement, and...
“Dreams of a safe place suddenly overtaken by the virus speak to contagion’s terrifying invisibility, says Cathy Caruth, a professor at Cornell University who has studied trauma for 30 years. Pandemic dreams, she says, are reminiscent of the experience of Hiroshima survivors, who worried about invisible radiation exposure, and also of some...
It is with deep regrets that we must announce the School of Criticism and Theory's 2020 summer session is postponed until 2021.This was not a decision made lightly, and we are aware of the disappointment it will cause. Yet in this somewhat unprecedented moment, we’ve had to carefully assess our plans with a view to first-and-foremost protect the...
The College of Arts & Sciences is gearing up for Giving Day on Thursday, March 12 and we hope you'll join in the fun!
“Imagine what the stuff of everyday life —personal letters, the deed of a house, a shop owner’s inventory records — might look like in medieval times. Since the late 1990s, historian Marina Rustow has immersed herself in a unique cache of such documents hidden away for centuries in an Egyptian synagogue.”Read more in Jamie Saxon’s article:...
Although Jonathan Culler’s “Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction” has been translated into 22 languages including Tamil and Macedonian, a French version had never been available.