Reading Seminars

A Unit reading seminar is a non-credit faculty/graduate student reading group. Topics change each semester and grow out of the interests and recommendations of Unit-affiliated faculty and students. Most seminars lead to a symposium or conference enabling us to read the work of our speakers in advance of their visit to our campus.

Current Reading Seminars

Lou Turner (Urban and Regional Planning, UIUC), Frantz Fanon Reading Group (Fall 2025)

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Past Reading Seminars

• Kenny Cupers (Architecture & Urban Studies, University of Basel), The Earth That Modernism Built
  Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design (Spring 2025)
• Tithi Bhattacharya (History, Purdue University), Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence (Fall 2024)
• Erik R. Seaman (History, University at Buffalo) Spring 2024
• Christy Pichichero (French, George Mason University) Spring 2024
• Swati Chattopadhyay (Architecture, University of California Santa Barbara) Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire (Fall 2023)
• Tim Ingold (Social Anthropology, University of Aberdeen), "“Philosophy with the People In: The Trajectory of an Environmental Anthropologist" (Spring 2023)
• Kaja Silverman (Art History, University of Pennsylvania), "Before the Before" (Spring 2023)
• Geraldine Heng (Comp. Lit, University of Texas at Austin), "Race Before the Modern Era: 'Presentism,' 'Intersectionality,' and the Politics of Keywords" (Spring 2023)
• Nicholson Distinguished Scholar Ananya Roy (UCLA), "Universalism and Its Others: The Limits of Critical Urban Theory" (Spring 2019)
• Nicholson Distinguished Scholar Audra Simpson (Columbia), "The Sovereignty of Critique" (Spring 2019)
• Ann Laura Stoler, "History as Renegade Politics" (Spring 2018)
• Transpacific Frames of War, Memory, and Representation(Fall 2017)
• Critical Inequalities (Spring 2014)
• Worlding Realisms (Spring 2014)
• Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture at 25: Theories for the New Millennium II (Fall 2013)
• Eighties in Theory & Practice (Spring 2013)
• Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture at 25: Theories for the New Millennium (Spring 2013)
• Beyond Utopia? (Spring 2012)
• Freedom and Its Discontents (Spring 2011)
• Bios: Life, Death, Politics (Spring 2010)
• Feminist Futures (Spring 2009)
• Subaltern Studies and Indigenous Critical Theory (Spring 2008)
• Affect Theory (Fall 2007)
• Where Are We? New Work in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies (Spring 2007)
• Re-thinking the State (Spring 2006)
• Cultural Politics of Neoliberalism (Spring 2005)
• Between the Secular and the Sacred (Fall 2005)
• Various Reading Groups (Summer 2005)
• Critical Foundations in an Anti-Foundational Age (Fall 2004)
• Modernities (Spring 2004)
• Modernities (Fall 2003)
• New Approaches to African-American Literature and Culture (Spring 2003)
• Historicism (Fall 2002)
• New Materialisms (Fall 2006)
• Postcolonial Studies (Spring 2002)
• Postcolonial Studies (Fall 2001)
• Recent Continental Political Theory (Spring 2001)
• Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics (Fall 2000)