Kritik Blog

On November 18, 2025, Pollyanna Rhee (Landscape Architecture, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and John Levi Barnard (English, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) engaged in a dialogue on “Environmental Humanities” as part of the Modern Critical Theory (MCT) lecture series.Their dialogue responded to a culture that often treats environmental knowledge as abundant yet...

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...

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,...

On November 7, 2023, the croak of a coqui greeted me as I entered the lecture hall for Ramón E. Soto-Crespo’s Modern Critical Theory talk, “Environmental Humanities and the Caribbean.” According to Soto-Crespo, the coqui and the Puerto Rican parrot are only two of the animals who fill the soundscape in the El Yunque National Forest. Both animals are on the verge of being silenced due to...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

On 15 November 2022, at the penultimate Fall lecture in the Modern Critical Lecture series, art historian Lisa Rosenthal discussed the gendered gaze that beholds the female nude through a series of paintings from the early modern period. The lecture began with a viewing of Johan Joseph Zoffany’s oil painting The Tribuna of the Uffizi. This painting guided the selection...

On November 1, 2022, Zsuzsa Gille (Sociology, UIUC) delivered the Modern Critical Theory lecture entitled “The Material(ity) Turn” which centered around texts and theories about how humans-nonhuman assemblages form political powers. All images and quotes are from the lecture unless otherwise noted. Gille began by addressing the inseparability of the material from the social, showing two...

On Tuesday October 25, 2022, Professor Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández (Toronto) delivered “The Pedagogies of Solidarity,” a lecture about understanding and developing pedagogies of solidarity. Quoted content is from the lecture unless noted otherwise. All images are by...

In her lecture titled “Marxism, Imperialism and the Beyond of Capitalism: Re-reading Rosa Luxemburg” Amy Allen implores scholars to move beyond the developmental arc of history, a theory of history borrowed from Karl Marx that Luxemburg embeds in her idea of the beyond of capitalism. Allen wants to understand what Luxemburg means by the beyond or outside of capitalism that is present in many of...

On October 11, 2022, Cameron McCarthy spoke at the Unit for Criticism on “The Postcolonial Imagination: Tools for Conviviality.” Beginning with his own high school education in Barbados, McCarthy used the school’s entrance examination system and literary curriculum—both determined in England and centered on an English canon—as an entry point into his broader questions about postcolonial art and...