On October 17, 2023, Professor Tamara Chaplin (History UIUC) presented her talk “Queering French History” as part of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory’s Modern Critical Theory lecture series. “How do I name the queer past?” This is a question Tamara Chaplin grapples with throughout her book Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France. In her Modern Critical Theory (MCT) lecture, Chaplin demonstrated how queer theory has informed her work as a historian. To begin uncovering how one might write a queer history of the past, Chaplin engaged the MCT...

On Tuesday September 5, 2023, Professor Liat Ben-Moshe (University of Illinois, Chicago) delivered a lecture in the Modern Critical Theory lecture series for the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her talk was titled “Decarcerating Disability: Prison Abolition and Deinstitutionalization.” Quoted content is from the lecture unless noted otherwise. All images are by 愚木混株 Cdd20 from Pixabay. Liat Ben-Moshe’s Modern Critical Theory lecture was a master class in public scholarship rooted in abolition and reclamation of disabled culture....