On October 31, 2023, Penelope Deutscher gave the lecture “Revocability, Exception, Disqualifying Qualification: Grammars of Power After Foucault and Roe” for the Unit for Criticism’s Modern Critical Theory lecture series. As a Foucauldian scholar, Deutscher’s work traces power through Foucault’s original theory and the revised grammars that have come afterwards.  The MCT lecture comes from her current project to name hinges of power in contemporary discourse and offers qualifying disqualification and disqualifying qualification as an intervention in naming methods of regulation. ...

Especially relevant in the era of Coronavirus and current labor movements in the U.S., Shirl Yang (postdoctoral researcher at Washington University of St. Louis) posits that novels set in empty offices undo a longstanding relation between narrative uncertainty and the 18th century notion of the work ethic. In her lecture on October 3, 2023, for the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, titled “A Labor Theory of Suspense,” Yang notes that the economic excitement of early capitalism was built upon the anxiety of spiritual predestination,...

On November 5, 2023, as a part of the XXXII Annual Tagore Festival, the acclaimed thespian and film director Suman Mukhopadhyay, hosted by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, as this semester’s George A Miller Visiting Artist, staged a play titled The Post Office: Tagore for the 21st Century Stage at the Channing Murray Foundation. The production was initially scheduled for the evening of October...

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...