Ghostly Histories and Capitalist Presence in Tithi Bhattacharya’s Colonial Bengal
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Image: The Babri Mosque in Ayodhya circa 1897. Its destruction, according to Bhattacharya, marked the beginning of modern Hindu nationalist ascendancy in India.
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...
Theorizing Premodern Alterity and Racial Rhetorics
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This symposium focuses on race-making as an imaginative act, constructed and articulated through rhetoric, broadly conceived as ranging from written and spoken discourse to visual communication and
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Ann Xiaoxu Pei
Ann Xiaoxu Pei is a PhD student in Comparative and World Literature program at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She works at the intersection of environmental humanities and memory studies,...
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Kelsi Quick
Kelsi Quick is a PhD student in the Political Science Department at the UIUC and a Research Assistant at the European Union Center. She has a strong interest in exploring the tension between the...
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Taisuke L. Wakabayashi (Landscape Architecture), Unit for Criticism SCT Fellow, Summer 2024
My summer at Cornell was a good one—a joyful, productive, and memorable experience.
Kei Kato (Geography), Unit for Criticism SCT Fellow, Summer 2024
Reflections on the School of Criticism and Theory, Summer 2024
For the six weeks from June 9 to July 18, I attended Cornell’s School of Criticism and Theory (SCT).
Introduction to Theory
This seminar introduces graduate students to theory, broadly construed. We will move through diverse texts to offer a range of contemporary theories about race, gender, literature, environment, indigeneity, and other matters. Throughout the semester we will ask ourselves “what is theory?” and, no doubt, come up with multiple answers.