We are a theoretically intensive and diverse faculty. Many of us engage directly and substantially with schools of theory and critical studies in our scholarship as well as in our teaching and our thesis advising. In addition to literary theory, our interests include critical theory, postmodernist and poststructuralist theories, Marxism, feminist and queer theories, critical race theory, disability theory, postcolonial theory, and avant-garde theory. The faculty’s coverage in cultural studies extends to science and technology studies, aesthetics and cultural studies, feminist cultural studies, film studies, reception theory, cultural policy studies, critical identity studies, and visual culture. Many of us are involved in theory-driven intra- and interdepartmental initiatives.
Some Recent Graduate Seminars
Contemporary Theory
Post-Colonial Theory
Reading Capital
Colonial Power, Postcolonial Malaise and Decolonial Space/Time: A Global Postcolonial Literature Survey including Key Postcolonial Classics and Decolonial Theory
Decolonization and the Critique of Capitalism
Whither Postcolonialism?
Cultural Critique and High-Tech Capitalism
Indigenous Politics: Theory, Art, Practice
Theory Now and Then
Reading Effluence: Planetary Health, Human Contagion and Sustainability
Critical Disability Proseminar
Japanism and its Reversals
Surfing in the W@ke of the Wake
Mass Culture Machines
Decolonial-Global South Health Humanities
The Humanities After Nature: From Ecocriticism to Ecotheory
Postcolonial and Decolonial theory
AI and English Studies: Practices, Paradigms, Genealogies
Intellectual Theory/New York Intellectuals
Global Asias as Tactic & Theory
Graduate Faculty
Historical Materialism
Cultural history, political economy, and philosophy of machine translation and artificial intelligence; cultural history, political economy, and philosophy of computing; philosophy of technology more broadly; platform, software, and code studies; programming languages and cultures of software development; media theory; Silicon Valley intellectual movements and spontaneous philosophies; translation theory
- 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; history of theory; negativity and critique; labor and management history; politics of race and gender; conjunctural analysis of culture and media
Graduate Students
Aesthetics and literary criticism of the Frankfurt School, the idea of marxist literary theory, the relationship of philosophy to literary criticism
Theory and Cultural Studies
Feminist Theories, Feminist Marxism, Black Feminisms, Indigenous Studies
Animal studies; phenomenology; post-Freudian psychoanalysis; hermeneutics; science studies
Psychoanalysis, Affect Theory
queer theory, spatial literary studies, phenomenology, affect, paranoid/reparative reading, narratology, relationality
Novel theory, formalism, Marxism
