College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory

Ghostly Histories and Capitalist Presence in Tithi Bhattacharya’s Colonial Bengal

An Image of the Babri Mosque in Ayodha, build c. 1897
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...

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Ann Xiaoxu Pei

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

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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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.

Genre and Infrastructure in the Global South

Professor Rebecca Oh Thurs, 12:30 - 02:50 PM Genre and infrastructure are both structuring forms that shape how things will go. Generic properties shape emplotment, likely or unlikely events, types of characters, and readerly expectations; genre organizes both narrative elements and the relations between them. Likewise, infrastructures are sociotechnical systems that organize and distribute both things and the relations between them, whether by enabling or blocking the movement of people, ideas, and objects. This seminar will consider the affordances of genre for infrastructure and of...
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