Fredric Jameson, Founder

Fredric Jameson’s (1934–2024) impact on the humanities and interpretative social sciences over the past five decades cannot be overstated. He was, as The Washington Post attests, “the greatest intellectual titan of the past half-century who remained largely unknown to the general public.” Professor Jameson’s influence extends far beyond the role he played in shaping the fields of modern critical theory and cultural and literary studies in the United States and internationally. His arrival to the Program in Literature in 1985 was instrumental in bringing the humanities at Duke to a position of national and international prominence. In 2003, when Professor Jameson stepped down from his role as Chair of the Program in Literature after 18 years, he established the Institute for Critical Theory (ICT), which was intended to function as a central point of contact for the coordination and rigorous promotion of critical theory throughout the humanities and social sciences at Duke. In 2025, the ICT was renamed The Jameson Institute for Critical Theory in celebration of his intellectual legacy.

Nima Bassiri, Director

Nima Bassiri teaches social theory and the history and philosophy of science in the Literature Program at Duke. His scholarship focuses on critical genealogies of the human and the social sciences, in an effort to draw out the underlying ethical, political, and theoretical ramifications of scientific thought. His first book is Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Nima joined the Institute as co-director in 2021. 

Roberto Maria Dainotto

Roberto Dainotto is Professor of Literature, Italian and International Comparative Studies at Duke University. He has been Professeur invitè at the Université Paris Ouest, and Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies in South Africa. His main research and teaching interests hinge on the concepts of place and space as narrative, rhetorical, and geopolitical organizational categories. His publications include Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Cornell UP, 2000); Europe (in Theory) (Duke UP, 2007), winner of the 2010 Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies; and Mafia: A Cultural History (Reaktion Books, 2015). He has also edited Racconti Americani del ‘900 (Einaudi scuola, 1999), a monographic issue of Italian Culture on Giambattista Vico (2017), and co-edited with Fredric Jameson Gramsci in the World (Duke UP, 2020).

Michael Hardt

Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University.  His works combine philosophical investigations with analyses of our current political situation.  Studying the current forms of social domination, including the mechanisms of capitalist control, which form the bases of the contemporary global power structures, is a central focus.  Key, too, is engagement with contemporary social movements that refuse domination and present the potential for new, democratic modes of social organization. His first book was Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (1993).  Over the course of several decades, his collaborations with Antonio Negri resulted in six books: Labor of Dionysus (1994), Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), Commonwealth (2009), Declaration (2012), and Assembly (2017).  His latest book, The Subversive Seventies (2023), analyzes liberation movements of the 1970s in a wide range of countries throughout the world, highlighting their relevance for political struggles today.  Since 2010 he has served as editor of the South Atlantic Quarterly.

Ranjana Khanna

Ranjana Khanna is Professor of English, Women's Studies, and the Literature Program at Duke University. She works on Anglo- and Francophone Postcolonial theory and literature, and Film, Psychoanalysis, and Feminist theory. She has published widely on transnational feminism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial and feminist theory, literature, and film. She is the author of Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2003) and Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation 1830 to the present (Stanford University Press, 2008.) She has published in journals like Differences, Signs, Third Text, Diacritics, Screen, Art History, positions, SAQ, Feminist Theory, and Public Culture. Her current book manuscripts in progress are called: Asylum: The Concept and the Practice and Technologies of Unbelonging.