On September 24, 2024 Lou Turner (Urban and Regional Planning, UIUC) and Zsuzsa Gille (Sociology, UIUC) gave a lecture on “Marxism” as part of the ongoing Modern Critical Theory lecture series organized by Unit for Criticism and Interpretative Theory at UIUC. Lou Turner’s lecture, titled “Marx: ‘The Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists,’” started with the young Karl Marx. “The ruthless criticism of all that exists” is a quote from a letter Marx wrote to his friend, Arnold Ruge. In it, Marx aimed to define radicalism and tried to rethink the nature of the criticisms of the time...

On October 29, 2024, Tithi Bhattacharya, a professor of History at Purdue University, delivered a lecture for the Unit for Criticism’s Modern Critical Theory Lecture series.  This lecture followed her talk at the Channing-Murray Center earlier in the day, and a graduate student reading group on October 28th. The lecture centered on Bhattacharya’s new book Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence, which examines tales of ghostly beings in Bengal, asking what they can tell us about past politics and ideologies. She suggests that ghosts illuminate the “backways and alleyways” of political history...