Retheorizing the University: Toward a New Institutionalism
Description
The university is a contradictory, or necessarily plural, institution. It is, and has been, a site of knowledge production, political critique, aesthetic education, class formation, racial segregation, social engineering, capital accumulation, and religious discipline—often all at once. As a site of theorization and utopic imagination, the university is a laboratory for experimental thought and liberatory practice, but as a site of elite capture and economic reproduction, the university serves to conserve the world as it is and to perpetuate hegemonic interests. The university as an institution is now under enormous political stress, not only in North America, where the new authoritarianism is seeking to dismantle academic autonomy, but in Turkey, where the new authoritarianism first tested its strategies; in South Africa, where the persistence of apartheid and colonial rationalities suggest that the new authoritarianism might not be all that new; and in China, where universities have long been entangled with the interests of party and state.
This seminar proposes to interrogate the current condition of the university in conversation both with earlier histories and critiques of the university and with recent theorizations of institutionality that we are terming the new institutionalism. It is vital, more than ever, to understand both the institutional limits and potentialities of the university, given the new authoritarianism’s fixation on dismantling the university alongside other public goods. Examples of this renewed call for institutionalism include writings in the last decade by Stefan Collini, Achille Mbembe, Ronald Barnett, Christopher Newfield, Helen Small, Eric Hayot, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, and Premesh Lalu, and by new publications in this decade by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Paul Reiter and Chad Wellmon, Caroline Levine, and Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan.
Participants are invited to think collectively about the past, present, and futures of the university, understood in its local and global institutional logics and histories, and with specific attention to the role of the liberal arts and the humanities. We invite papers that are not limited to critiques of institutional power, but also attempt to think through the institutional form and revitalize the question of what universities are for. We are particularly interested in papers that seek to conceptualize the liberal arts and humanities as part of democratic society, consider places of research and learning beyond the North American context, and reimagine the possibilities of institutional structures and practices in the university.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Jack W. Chen is Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Virginia, where he also serves concurrently as Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, and Director of the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures.
Speaker Bio
Maurits van Bever Donker’s research specialisation is in Black Consciousness Philosophy and Négritude, and examines the modes through which these global postcolonial and decolonial discourses re-script our understandings of political philosophy and the world. He researches and teaches across Postcolonial Theory and Aesthetics, African Philosophy and Literatures, and African History. His monograph, Texturing Difference (2024), is available through Polity Press in the series Critical South.
Speaker Bio
Delarys Ramos Estrada is a PhD student in English at the University of California, Berkeley where she is currently wrapping up her dissertation, More Serious Than Tears: African American Experiments in Comic Form. Her research lies at the intersection of black studies, laughter and the comic, and histories of criticism.
Speaker Bio
Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Arts & Letters and University Distinguished Professor of English at Michigan State University. She is director of Knowledge Commons, a network serving nearly 60,000 scholars across the disciplines and around the world, and she is author of Leading Generously: Tools for Transformation, (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024) and Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Victor Luftig is Professor and co-Director of the Center for the Liberal Arts, a vehicle for offering professional development programs to K-12 teachers, at the University of Virginia. He has also served as director of the expository writing programs at Yale, Brandeis, and UVA, and taught high school teachers for 19 summers at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English.
Speaker Bio
Cole Adams is a PhD candidate in the Program in Literature and Feminist Studies at Duke University. His dissertation, "Critical Exhaustion: Campus Crisis and the Poetry of Repair," rethinks the stories of disciplinary crisis and fragmentation that have recurred in U.S. literary studies by reexamining the writing lives of four feminist poet-critics who navigated political backlash in the 90s: Adrienne Rich, Susan Howe, Dionne Brand, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
Speaker Bio
Tamara Levitz is Professor of Comparative Literature and Musicology and the Chair of Comparative Literature at UCLA. She works on literary and musical modernism and critical university studies. She has recently completed a book manuscript on Critique in the Shadow of Academic Freedom in which she examines the racial capitalist foundation of academic freedom—a concept that has come to delimit the possibility of critique in the discipline of Music Theory.
Speaker Bio
Mia Florin-Sefton is a Lecturer-in-Discipline at Columbia University where she also teaches at Taconic Correctional Facility with the Center for Justice in Education. Her current research project excavates the ideological and historical links between liberal penology and humanities pedagogy, and in AY 2023 she was a fellow with the Humanities Center Initiative NY, where she developed syllabi for incarcerated students. Her writing has appeared in Diacritics, Novel, and Post45, among others.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Roman Lashin obtained his PhD in Chinese Literature from Hong Kong Baptist University with a dissertation on contemporary Sinophone academic fiction. His research interests include contemporary Sinophone, Anglophone, and Russophone literature, comparative and world literature, academic fiction, critical university studies, and digital humanities. His work appeared in Writing Chinese: A Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Literature and the Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies.
Speaker Bio
Tim Roberts is an independent scholar and principal of np:, which enacts institutional critique via an effort to initiate new scholarly presses and by publishing university-critical projects. He holds a doctorate in Intermedia Art, Writing, and Performance and is the director of Counterpath, an arts and performance space based in Colorado and New York City.
Speaker Bio
Katharine Wallerstein, PhD, researches and writes on aesthetics and politics, the body, desire, and transformations of the social. She is currently writing on philosopher Simone Weil, writer Colette, filmmaker Claire Denis, and on utopic spaces. She is director of the new Wallerstein Institute for World Futures in Paris, co-director of the CHCI Critical Humanities Spaces Network, and associate researcher at CRAL-EHESS, Paris and the Centre for Humanities Research at UWC.