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  • Woven Chronicle--Installation Art Image Reena Kallat
  • Red and black background with the cover of Colonial Racial Capitalism, the most recent publication from the Unit
  • beatriz milhazes installation in Sao Paolo
  • Mycelium Matrix painting-Greg Allen
  • Critical Book Labs collage
  • Woven Chronicle--Installation Art Image Reena Kallat
    Working from the South of Theory
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  • Red and black background with the cover of Colonial Racial Capitalism, the most recent publication from the Unit
    Continuing the tradition of producing theory with Colonial Racial Capitalism
    Learn more about the latest Unit publication
  • beatriz milhazes installation in Sao Paolo
    Modern Critical Theory Lecture Series

    a series of public lectures on the history of critical theory

    Learn More
  • Mycelium Matrix painting-Greg Allen
    Our faculty

    a mycelium matrix linking 10 colleges, 37 departments 

    Affiliated Faculty Members
  • Critical Book Labs collage
    Critical Book Labs
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  • Shape of a body behind falling water with one hand pushing through
    SPAN 535

    Bodies Experimentales

    Prof: Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gómez Meets: Wednesdays 2-4:50 pm Experimentar (verb. to experience; to experiment) leads this seminar on a study of how bodies experiment with political and cultural narratives about its experiences. Moreover, in this vein, the structure of the seminar...
    Course Description for SPAN 535
  • a pixelated Earth
    ERAM 554

    Pro-seminar in Postcolonial Theory and Methodology

    Prof: Cameron McCarthy Meets: Thursdays 12-2:50 pm (Online) Within the past decade and a half or so, there has been a steady expansion of scholarship calling attention to the rethinking of center-periphery relations between the third world and the first world.This body of scholarship--most often...
    Course Description for ERAM 554
  • Adoration of the Kings by Gerard David
    REL 511

    Intro to Political Theology

    Prof: Bruce Rosenstock Meets: Mondays 3-5:00 pm The study of political theology is focused on the concept of sovereignty as both a human and a divine institution. The course examines its roots in the Hebrew Bible and traces how it changes from antiquity to modernity, especially in the context of...
    Course Description for REL 511
  • paper, ink, scissors and other materials sit on a table
    ARTH 540

    Theories of Material Culture

    Prof: David O’Brien Meets: Tuesdays 2:00-4:50 pm This seminar introduces students to a variety interpretive modes for understanding material culture. It asks: how has the recent emphasis on the material world reshaped the humanities and, in particular, art history? We will begin by examining some...
    Course Description for ARTH 540
  • painting of a child looking at a moon in a fish tank
    AAS 539

    Youth, Culture and Society

    Prof: Soo Ah Kwon Meets: Wednesdays 2:00-4:50 pm (Davenport Hall, room 312) Examines youth as a historically and culturally specific social formation; examines discursive and material positioning of youth within broader intersecting racial, cultural, socio-economic, gender and political contexts...
    Course Description for AAS 539
  • a woman in a green victorian dress, holding a bowl of roses
    ENGL 537

    The Scandal of Aestheticism

    Prof: Eleanor Courtmanche Meets: Mondays 3:00-5:30 pm (FLB, room 1018) The aesthetic creed of “art for art’s sake,” first codified in an essay by Théophile Gautier, was a bohemian slogan that was considered scandalous in the 19th century. Its rejection of the moral function of art became, by the...
    Course Description for ENGL 537
  • a landscape with mountains, water, and a big planet in the background
    MDIA 590

    Movie Magic: History and Technology of VFX

    Prof: Julie Turnock Meets: Tuesdays 1:00-3:50 pm This roughly chronological course will explore special effects technology, history and aesthetics. More specifically, we will use the technological history of special effects (which span cinema history) to examine representational strategies of...
    Course Description for MDIA 590
  • prague library
    ENGL 581

    What is World Literature?

    Prof: Waïl Hassan Meets: Wednesdays 3:00-5:00 pm This seminar examines the concept of “world literature,” from Goethe’s popularization of the term “Weltliteratur” to the current academic industry, which has boomed since the end of the Cold War, producing conferences, workshops, monographs, and...
    Course Description for ENGL 581
  • two faces, facing eachother against a prism background
    PS 572

    Histories of Political Theories II: Modern Political Theory

    Prof: Samantha Frost Meets: Mondays 9:30-11:50 am (David Kinley Hall, room 404) In this course, we will survey key texts in European modern political theory, supplemented with texts from non-Western sources. The aim will be to identify and articulate the contours of the modern liberal subject, to...
    Course Description for PS 572
  • stairs and an open door
    SOC 501

    Contemporary Social Theory

    Prof: Zsuzsa Gille Meets: 3:30-6:30 pm (FLB, Room 1048) The purpose of this course is to provide graduate students with a systematic overview of contemporary social and sociological theories from various parts of the world as they relate to the central issues of power, culture, and subjectivity....
    Course Description for SOC 501
  • two women sit together and look at each other
    ENGL 564

    Minoritarian Aesthetics

    Prof: Sandra Ruiz Meets: Tuesdays 1:00-3:30 pm (English, Room 123) This course will engage aesthetics beyond its common understanding as the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and appreciation of art and culture, with principles like taste, beauty, the sublime, and (dis)pleasure....
    Course Description for ENGL 564
  • manyabstract heads
    LAW 657

    International Human Rights Law

    Professor: Francis A. Boyle Meets: Mondays & Tuesdays 3-4:15 pm (online) Based primarily on a series of contemporary “real world” problems, the course introduces the student to the established and developing legal rules and procedures governing the protection of international human rights....
    Course Description for LAW 657
  • A bust of Frank McWorter, copies of which appear in the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

    New Philadelphia Receives National Park Designation

    "New Philadelphia was the first known town planned and legally registered by an African American before the Civil War. Frank McWorter, a formerly enslaved man from Kentucky, founded the town in 1836 and bought his freedom and the freedom of 15 family members. The rural community situated near the...
    Read full story New Philadelphia Receives National Park Designation
  • Adrian Wong headshot

    Graduate Affiliate Adrian Wong Awarded Fulbright-Hays Fellowship

    Unit Affiliated Graduate student Adrian Wong has been awarded a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Fellowships. "He will travel to the greater Santiago Metropolitan Region to study the development of digital infrastructure in Chile amid the context of social and...
    Read full story Graduate Affiliate Adrian Wong Awarded Fulbright-Hays Fellowship
  • AAG Logo

    Faculty Affiliate David Wilson Receives Lifetime Achievement Honor from the Association of American Geographers

    David Wilson (Geography and GGIS, Urban Planning, Unit for Criticism) was recently made a lifetime Association of American Geographers (AAG) Fellow for his contributions to critical urban studies. His research focuses on the class and racial production of disadvantaged and elite spaces, emergent...
    Read full story Faculty Affiliate David Wilson Receives Lifetime Achievement Honor from the Association of American Geographers
  • Soraya Cipolla

    Graduate Student Spotlight: Soraya Cipolla

    Soraya Cipolla is originally from Catania, a town in Sicily. She earned her Bachelor’s in Italian Literature and Linguistics at University of Catania. Then she completed her Master’s in Linguistics and Communications at the University of Siena, in Tuscany. She is a graduate student in the French...
    Read full story Soraya Cipolla

More Department News

  • 40 Years of Theory: Timothy Ingold "Philosophy with the People In"
    Tim Ingold is a renowned anthropologist whose work has examined the relationship between the material and the social in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, art, and architecture. A phenomenologist, Ingold sees humans as beings that move through and sense a world that is itself also moving. In...
    Read full story
  • 40 Years of Theory: Kaja Silverman "Before the Before"
    Kaja Silverman (University of Pennsylvania Sachs Professor of Art History) has been an important theorist of visuality for the past four decades. In 2011 she was given the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award by the Mellon Foundation in recognition of her outstanding contributions to scholarship...
    Read full story
  • Distinguished Lecture from Geraldine Heng
    Dr. Geraldine Heng delivered the Krouse Family Visiting Scholar in Judaism and Western Culture Lecture, titled "Race Before the Modern Era: 'Presentism,' 'Intersectionality,' and the Politics of Keywords." Professor Heng's visit was co-sponsored by the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory,...
    Read full story
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Land Acknowledgement

Grandmother stands on a turtle in the water, looking at the moon

We acknowledge that we are on the homelands of the Peoria, Kaskaskia, Piankashaw, Wea, Miami, Mascoutin, Odawa, Sauk, Mesquaki, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Chickasaw Nations. We honor these ancestral grounds as the traditional territory of these Native Nations prior to their forced removal. As members of a land-grant institution, we are obligated to know the histories of dispossession that have allowed the University of Illinois to grow. We must acknowledge and reflect on colonialism as an active crisis and address the role that this university has played in it. The centering of Native peoples is merely a start in committing to undoing the erasure of Native voices, histories, and futures. We have a responsibility to decolonize this institution and our communities, to raise consciousness about indigenous sovereignty, and to act in ways that bring about justice. 

Donate to the Native American House at the University of Illinois.

About the Artist: Waab-Shki-Makoons (Clayton Samuel King) is a multimedia artist living in Ontario, Canada. He is of Bodewadmi (Potawatomi) Anishinabek and Chi Mookomaan descent and is a member of Beausoleil First Nation, otherwise known as Chimnissing. Nookmis and the Water Beings is acrylic on canvas. 

 

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