Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory

The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory is an interdisciplinary program developed within the Graduate College and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It works to promote conversations among a range of departments in the humanities, social sciences, and performing arts by organizing lectures, panel discussions, and conferences, as well as a yearly series of lectures on Modern Critical Theory. The Unit is one of several dozen centers around the world devoted to critical theory.

Founded in 1981 under the leadership of Cary Nelson, the Unit has promoted scholarly discussion and debate about topics such as poststructuralism, cultural studies, Marxism, feminism, postcolonial theory, and the politics of disciplinarity and knowledge production. In The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies, literary scholar Michael Berube writes that "[b]y formally bringing together, through zero-time appointments, faculty members from disciplines engaged in some degree by theorized recursivity," the Unit for Criticism "has helped produce dialogue spoken in a kind of esperanto based in shared hermeneutic practices," performing an important interdisciplinary function within the university. Books derived from Unit conferences, such as Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, and Cultural Studies have become landmarks of critical discourse in the academy. Although some criticized the books for being excessively theoretical and for what Terry Eagleton, in a review of Cultural Studies, called the “anything-goes-ism” of cultural studies, they provoked discussion about the nature of interdisciplinary work in the humanities and social sciences. Hayden White called Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture a "major event in the discourse of cultural criticism of our time," Timothy Brennan noted that Marxism was “already featured on the reading lists of cultural studies seminars across the country,” and Kristine L. Fitch wrote of Cultural Studies that “As an inquisitive stance from which to conduct research into a complex world of human beings and human problems, the book has a great deal to offer even when one does not entirely buy (as I do not) what cultural studies scholars do or how they do it.”

Over the years, guests of the Unit have included Linda Martín Alcoff, Perry Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Étienne Balibar, Gopal Balakrishnan, Tony Bennett, Lauren Berlant, Michael Bérubé, Homi Bhabha, Svetlana Boym, Timothy Brennan, Wendy Brown, Pheng Cheah, James Clifford, William E. Connolly, Tim Dean, Lisa Duggan, Terry Eagleton, Roberto Esposito, Grant Farred, James Ferguson, Nancy Fraser, Simon Frith, Jane Gallop, Paul Gilroy, Gerald Graff, John Guillory, Judith Halberstam, Catherine Hall, Stuart Hall, Donna Haraway, Dick Hebdige, Andreas Huyssen, Fredric Jameson, Martin Jay, Lynne Joyrich, Paul W. Kahn, Amy Kaplan, David Kazanjian, Rashid Khalidi, Paul Khan, Audrey Kobayashi, Ernesto Laclau, Christopher Lane, Henri Lefebvre, David Lloyd, Saba Mahmood, Toril Moi, Franco Moretti, Chantal Mouffe, Jeff Nunokawa, Elizabeth Povinelli, Paul Rabinow, Bruce Robbins, Tricia Rose, Andrew Ross, Joan Scott, Ella Shohat, Kaja Silverman, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Michael Szalay, James Vernon, Gauri Viswanathan, Priscilla Wald, Michael Warner, Mark Weisbrot, Eyal Weizman, Cornel West, Patricia J. Williams, and Linda Zerilli.

From 1981-1983 the Unit was directed by Cary Nelson. From 1984-2003 the Unit was directed Peter K. Garrett, Professor of English.[1] From 2003-2009, the Unit was directed by Michael Rothberg, Professor of English [2] and current Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies Initiative [3] also at the University of Illinois. In Fall 2009, Lauren M. E. Goodlad,[4] after a year as Interim Director in 2008-9, became the Unit’s current director.

Conferences and symposia

• The Eighties in Theory and Practice (2013)
• Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture at 25: Theories for the New Millennium (2013)
• Beyond Utopia? Art, Theory, and the Coming of "Spring" (2012)
• The Ends of History (2012)
• Freedom and Its Discontents (2011)
• Bios: Life, Death, Politics (2010)
• Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s (2010)
• Feminist Futures (2009)
• Comparative Human Rights: Literature, Art, Politics (2009)
• Decolonizations: Subaltern Studies and Indigenous Critical Theory (2008)
• Poetry, Politics & the Profession: A Tribute to Cary Nelson (2006)
• States of Welfare (2006)
• Rethinking Secularism in an Age of Belief (2005)
• Fetishizing the Free Market: The Cultural Politics of Neoliberalism (2005)
• Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (2002)

Books and special issues derived from Unit conferences

• Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press, 2012)
• Between Subalternity and Indigeneity (Interventions: International Journal of Postocolonial Studies, vol. 13, iss. 1, 2011)
• States of Welfare (Occasion, vol. 2, 2010)
• Comparative Human Rights (Journal of Human Rights, vol. 9, no. 2, 2010)
• Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University (SUNY Press, 2009)
• Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Duke UP, 2005)
• Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (Princeton UP, 2001)
• Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1996)
• Higher Education Under Fire (Routledge, 1994)
• Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1991)
• Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (U of Illinois P, 1988)

External links

• The Unit for Criticism's official website