The Critical Theory Workshop highlights current scholarship in the ever-evolving practice of “critical theory,” understood in the broadest sense.
CTW strives to broaden the scholarly project of critical theory beyond the remit of the familiar and formative Frankfurt School and traditions of Marxist analysis in order to reappraise the project of “critique” and the value of theoretically committed scholarship across more comprehensive global contexts, historical transformations, and scholarly registers. As such, CTW is committed to exploring emergent critical-theoretical scholarship throughout a range of disciplinary subfields of the humanities and interpretative social sciences, including literary theory, aesthetics, and media studies; critical race and post-colonial theory; global south and secularity studies; social and political theory; history and theory of political economy; critical conceptual history; science and technology studies; gender and queer theory; geography and urbanization studies; disability theory; and critical environmental humanities.
Graduate Student Co-Chairs
Yuting Hu
Yuting Hu is a PhD student in the Literature Program and the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute (APSI). She is now serving as the co-chair for the Critical Theory Workshop (CTW), the Jameson Institute for Critical Theory. Her research focuses on the construction of national subjectivity in anti-realist narratives in twentieth- and twenty-first century Chinese and Sinophone literature and media. She also works on Chinese literary and digital modernism and postmodernism, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, queer narratives, and video game studies.
Carson Welch
Carson Welch is a doctoral candidate in Literature at Duke University. His research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglophone literature, comparative modernisms, and the history and theory of the novel. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Modernism/Modernity, and Radical Philosophy. He is also the editor of Fredric Jameson’s lectures on French theory (The Years of Theory, Verso, 2024) and modern German thought (Verso, forthcoming).
Participants
Leif Weatherby, German, New York University
Andrea Bachner, Comparative Literature, Cornell University
Leigh Claire La Berge, English, Borough of Manhattan Community College, The City University of New York
Samera Esmeir, Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley
Salome Aguilera Skvirsky, Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago
HeeJin Lee, East Asian Languages, Literatures & Cultures, University of Pittsburgh
Calvin Warren, African American Studies, Emory University
Parisa Vaziri, Comparative Literature & Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University
Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, English, University of Ottawa
Paul Nadal, English and American Studies, Princeton University
Luka Arsenjuk, Cinema and Media Studies, University of Maryland, College Park
Karen Ng, Philosophy, Vanderbilt University
Ikyo Day, English, Critical Social Thought and Gender Studies, Mount Holyoke College
Pooja Rangan, English, Film and Media Studies, Amherst College
Chris Chen, Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz
Annie J. McClanahan, English, University of California, Irvine
Fumi Okiji, Rhetoric, University of California, Berkley
Brian R. Jacobson, Visual Culture, California Institute of Technology
Martín Arboleda, Sociology, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile
