Society for Critical Exchange

Theory Institute

March 26-29, 2020

Fourteen distinguished scholars from the U.S. and Europe in three days of engaging discussion.

About SCE The Society for Critical Exchange is North America’s oldest scholarly organization devoted to theory. Our various interdisciplinary projects, conferences, and symposia serve to advance the role of theory in academic and intellectual arenas. Our projects encompass a broad spectrum of disciplines, most prominently literary and cultural studies, legal studies and practices, economics, philosophy, and pedagogy.

The 2020 Institute The Society for Critical Exchange (SCE), this year co-sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Houston-Victoria, is pleased to announce the topic of the eleventh annual SCE Theory Institute: World Global Planetary.

In fields across the humanities and sciences, the certainty about what the word “world” means has fallen away. In some places it has been replaced by terms such “multi-national” or “trans-national”; in others, by “global,” “global cosmopolitan,” “planetary” or even just “big.” In some places, “world” has even been restored to new meanings. In all cases there is a struggle to understand the shifting relationships between epistemology and scale and between human, species, and things. This event aims to bring together a range of intellectuals from various disciplines who work on this topic. The purpose is not to resolve tensions, but to better understand the historical, theoretical and projective issues that swirl around them.

The following presenters will be addressing these issues and other topics of interest.

Frida Beckman

Frida Beckman is Professor in Comparative Literature at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, Sweden. She has published on among other things Deleuze, Foucault, sex, and control, and is currently working on a project on paranoia in post-WW2 U.S. politics, critique, and literature.

“Losing World”

Frida Beckman
Frida Beckman

Sophia A. McClennen

Sophia A. McClennen is professor of international affairs and comparative literature at Penn State University and founding director of the Center for Global Studies. Her recent books are Is Satire Saving Our Nation?, coauthored with Remy Maisel, and The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights, co-edited with Alexandra Schultheis Moore.

“Provincial Problems in International Relations”

Sophia A. McClennen
Sophia A. McClennen

Jeffrey R. Di Leo

Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Dean of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria. He is also Executive Director of the SCE. His recent books include The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory and The End of American Literature. His forthcoming book is entitled Vinyl Theory.

“World Publishing”

Jeffrey R. Di Leo
Jeffrey R. Di Leo

Christian Moraru

Christian Moraru is Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His recent books include Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary and Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology.

“Turning to the World: Comparatism and the Reinvention of Weltliteratur in the Twenty-First Century”

Christian Moraru
Christian Moraru

Denise Ferreira da Silva

Denise Ferreira da Silva is a Professor and Director of The Social Justice Institute (the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice) at the University of British Columbia. Her academic writings and artistic practice address the ethical questions of the global present and target the metaphysical and ontoepistemological dimensions of modern thought.

Denise Ferreira da Silva
Denise Ferreira da Silva

Eliana AbuHamdi Murchie

Eliana AbuHamdi Murchie, Ph.D., is currently Global Architecture History Teaching Collaborative Project Manager as well as Adjunct Assistant Professor at Hunter College in the Department of Political Science. She is an architectural historian, urbanist, designer, and Middle Eastern/Global South scholar. Currently she is also actively developing her dissertation into a monograph.

Eliana AbuHamdi Murchie
Eliana AbuHamdi Murchie

Mark Jarzombek

Mark Jarzombek is Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at MIT. He has published and lectured on a wide range of topics, both historical and theoretical. His most recent book is The Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age.

“The Global Turn: Isozaki, Architecture, and the Impossible Algorithmic Volumification and the Ambivalence of Control”

Mark Jarzombek
Mark Jarzombek

Ijlal Muzaffar

Ijlal Muzaffar is an Associate Professor of Modern Architectural History and the Director of the Global Arts and Cultures program at Rhode Island School of Design. He has published widely on the intersection of architecture, planning and globalization.

“Why Did the Chicken Cross the Ocean?”

Ijlal Muzaffar
Ijlal Muzaffar


Robin Truth Goodman

Robin Truth Goodman is a Professor of English at Florida State University. Her published works include The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st Century Feminist Theory, Promissory Notes: On the Literary Conditions of Debt, and Gender for the Warfare State: Literature of Women in Combat.

“Gender Commodity in an Age of Financial Ruin”

Robin Truth Goodman
Robin Truth Goodman

Vikramāditya Prakāsh

Vikramāditya “Vikram” Prakāsh is Professor or Architecture at the University of Washington and founding board member of Global Architecture History Teaching Collaborative. He is an architect, an architectural historian and theorist. He works on issues of modernism, postcoloniality, global history and fashion & architecture.

“In 1/2 Inch increments: Diffraction and the Global Modern”

Vikramāditya “Vikram” Prakāsh
Vikramāditya “Vikram” Prakāsh

Peter Hitchcock

Peter Hitchcock is a Professor of English at the Graduate Center and Baruch College of CUNY. He is also on the faculty of the Film Studies and Women’s Studies Certificate Programs. He is currently Associate Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the GC. His books include Dialogics of the Oppressed, Oscillate Wildly, Imaginary States, The Long Space, fand Labor in Culture.

“On the Scale of Commoning and the Commons”

Peter Hitchcock
Peter Hitchcock

Kenneth J. Saltman

Kenneth J. Saltman is currently a Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He is the author most recently of The Politics of Education: A Critical Introduction, Second Edition and The Swindle of Innovative Educational Finance.

“The New Global Capitalism and the New Educational Privatization”

Kenneth J. Saltman
Kenneth J. Saltman

Ana Maria Leon

Ana María León is an architect and a historian of objects, buildings, and landscapes. Her research and teaching examines the modernity of the Americas and its transcontinental flows, with particular focus on how different publics relate to each other through spatial practices and discourses of power and resistance.

“My North is the South”

Ana Maria Leon
Ana Maria Leon

Nicole Simek

Nicole Simek is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and Professor of French and Interdisciplinary Studies at Whitman College. She is the author of Hunger and Irony in the French Caribbean: Literature, Theory, and Public Life and translator of Maryse Condé’s The Belle Créole.

“Speculative Worlds and Epistemologies of Race”

Nicole Simek
Nicole Simek

The Institute will take place from Thursday, March 26 to Sunday, March 29 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Presentations will take place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Additional details regarding the Society for Critical Exchange or the upcoming Winter Theory Institute can be found at the Society for Critical Exchange’s website or by contacting Executive Director Jeffrey R. Di Leo.