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Theory and Cultural Studies

Theory and Cultural Studies

Many of us engage directly and substantially with schools of theory and/or Cultural Studies in our scholarship as well as in our graduate and undergraduate teaching and our thesis advising. Our theoretical interests include critical theory, postmodernist and poststructuralist theories, feminist and queer theories, critical race theory, disability theory, postcolonial theory, avant-garde theory, and of course literary theory. Our range in Cultural Studies extends to cultural studies of science and technology, aesthetics and cultural studies, feminist cultural studies, film studies, reception theory, cultural policy studies, Latino/a cultural studies, and visual culture. Many of us are involved in theory-driven intra- and interdepartmental initiatives.

Recent Grad Courses

  • Studies in Theory: Foucault
  • Studies in Theory: Derrida
  • Post-Postmodernism
  • Intellectual Backgrounds to Modernism
  • Introduction to Visual Culture
  • Introduction to Social Thought
  • The Body Shop: Liberalism and Cultural Theory
  • Theory v. Theory
  • Faulkner and His Literary Descendents
  • Modernity
  • What Was Cultural Studies?
  • Theories of Reading
  • Black to the Future: Afro-Futurisms
  • Building the Multiple: A Seminar in A Thousand Plateaus
  • Histories and Historiographies of Rhetoric
  • Theories of Feminism
  • Queer Modernism
  • Writing Nonfiction: Defacement
  • Sexologies: An Introduction to Sex Studies
  • Spaces of Culture
  • Cultural Policy Studies
  • Latino/a Cultural Studies
  • Sex in Space: Feminist Media Studies
  • Introduction to Disability Studies
  • Feminist Science Studies
  • Literature, Medicine and Culture
  • Spectacular Technoscience: Images and the Theatre of Scientific Change
  • Edward Said and C.L.R. James

Graduate Faculty

Historical Materialism

Media theory

history of medicine, Georges Canguilhem; feminist theories of embodiment; disability theory; critical disability studies

Post-structuralism; cultural studies; poetics; theories of race and ethnicity; Black theory and criticism.

Theory of identity and identification; Critique of historicism; Statism; National and nationalist discourse; Modernism and postmodernism; Habits of thought and recognition; Literary history and literary critical orthodoxies; Intellectuals; Philosophy and literature; Aesthetics

Philosophy of technology; negativity and critique; history of theory; labor and management history; politics of race and gender; cultural and media studies

Graduate Students

Theories of Race and Racism, Historical Materialism, Political Aesthetics

Affect theory; phenomenology; science and technology studies; environmental humanities; public sphere theory; queer theory

Black existentialism

Ontology

Black Feminism, fugitivity, and materiality

Novel theory, formalism, critical university studies and institutional analysis