Image
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
Marxism: Lectures on Capital by David Harvey (Spring 2026)
Past Reading Seminars
- Lou Turner (Urban and Regional Planning, UIUC), Frantz Fanon Reading Group (Fall 2025)
- 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)