Events

We invite you to attend the Fall 2025 MCT lecture series, featuring discussions on contemporary theory and its varied engagements. Lectures will be held every Tuesday from 5:15 to 6:45 PM (location TBD). Face masks are encouraged for in-person attendance.

The series is coordinated with graduate seminars on critical theory across multiple departments but is open to all faculty, students, and others who may wish to join. Please note that the lectures will not be live-streamed for remote viewers, though some may be recorded (pending speaker permission). You can access previous MCT lectures in our video collections.

For participants not enrolled in one of the affiliated courses, see the Box folder of corresponding readings for each lecture (available soon). To access the box folder, please email us for the password. To see the poster in a larger format, click here. For more information, including the password to access the readings, please email Unit-for-Criticism@illinois.edu.

Schedule

9/2  WELCOME RECEPTION 

Pizzeria Antica (10 E. Chester Street, Champaign), 5:15-7:00 pm

 

9/9  INTRODUCTION TO THEORY (“What Is Theory? Inside the Fascist Sequence”)

Peter Coviello (English, University of Illinois Chicago)  

  • Puar, Jasbir K. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Chapter 4: “Will Not Let Die,” pp. 127–154, plus notes. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
  • Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. Chapter 4: “The General Strike,” pp. 55–83. New York: The Free Press, 1998.
  • Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Chapters 2 and 6–9, pp. 83–89, 108–135. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
  • Clover, Joshua. “Passover.” Popula, April 17, 2019. https://popula.com/2019/04/17/passover/

 

9/16  MARXISM 

Richard Gilman-Opalsky (Politics & International Affairs, University of Illinois Springfield) 

Matt Soener (Sociology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)  

  • Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Section 4: “Estranged Labor.” New York: International Publishers.
  • Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Notebook 1, October 1857, “The Chapter on Money,” pp. 115–218. London: Penguin Classics.
  • Dunayevskaya, Raya. Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution in Permanence for Our Day. Chapter: “The Todayness of Marx’s Humanism.” Leiden/Boston: Brill.
  • Gilman-Opalsky, Richard, and Bruno Gulli. Communist Ontologies. Chapters 3 and 4: “Human Being and Becoming” and “Communism, Common, Marxist Trajectories.”

 

9/23  WALTER BENJAMIN 

Anna Hunt (German, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson (Philosophy, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

  • Benjamin, Walter. "Toward the Critique of Violence" in Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition, edited by Julia Ng and Peter Fenves. pp. 39-61. Sanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021
  • Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on Philosophy of History" in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. Schocken Books, 1969.
  • Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1998. “Threshold,” pp. 41–43.
  • Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, translated by George Schwab. pp. 5-52. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005
 

10/7  POST-STRUCTURALISM

François Proulx (French & Italian, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

  • Barthes, Roland. “La mort de l’auteur” (1968)
  • Barthes, Roland. S/Z (1970), from “I. L’évaluation” to “XII. Le tissu des voix"
  • Barthes, Roland. “Leçon” (1978)
  • Barthes, Roland. “Introduction” (séance du 2 décembre 1978), and “Le Roman” (séance du 9 décembre 1978), from La Préparation du roman I (audio recordings also available: https://revue.roland-barthes.org/audio/
  • Barthes, Roland. “Introduction” and “The Novel,” from The Preparation of the Novel, Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France, tr. Kate Briggs, Columbia University Press, 2010, p. 3-19.
  • Sedgwick, Eve K. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” from Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003)
 

10/14  FEMINISM (Latin America/Latinx Feminist Geographies)

Sofía Zaragocín (Geography & GIS, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

  • Zaragocin, Sofia, and Caretta, Martina Angela. 2020. “Cuerpo-Territorio: A Decolonial Feminist Geographical Method for the Study of Embodiment.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111 (5): 1503–18.
  • Glockner, Valentina, et al. 2023. “The Cuerpo-Territorio of Displacement: A Decolonial Feminist Geopolitics of Re-Existencia.” Geopolitics 29 (4): 1220–44.

 

10/21  QUEER THEORY

Tim McCarthy (Education, Harvard University)  

 

10/28  BIOPOLITICS

Ciro Incoronato (Italian, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

 

11/4  RACE

Stephen Best (English, University of California Berkley)

    

11/11  COLONIAL/DECOLONIAL THEORY

Julian Go (Sociology, University of Chicago)  

 

11/18  ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES dialogue

John Levi Barnard (English, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Pollyanna Rhee (Landscape Architecture, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)