THE UNIVERSITY AND ITS PUBLICS: NORTH, SOUTH, AND IN BETWEEN
Critical Epistemology, Knowing
through
Gender
and the
Decolonial
Hacer Escuela/
Inventing School: Rethinking the Pedagogy of Critical Theory
Decolonizing Critical Theory
Technologies of Critique: New Sources for Critical Theory
After Foucault: Gender and Biopolitics in the Americas
Aesthetics and the Critique of Political Theology
Critical
theory
in the
Global
South
TRAUMA, POLITICS, AND THE USES OF MEMORY
Anna Parkinson is an Associate Professor of German and an affiliate of the Gender and Sexualities Program at Northwestern University. She is the author of An Emotional State: The Politics of Emotion in Postwar West German Culture (2015) as well as numerous articles. Her teaching and research interests include twentieth and twenty first century German literature and film, memory studies, genocide studies, translation theory, gender and queer theory, contemporary South African literature and film, and psychoanalysis.
Sarah Nuttall is a Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and the Director of WiSER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the author of the monograph Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-apartheid (2009) and the editor or co-editor of a number of books, including Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia (1996), Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics (2007), and Johannesburg – The Elusive Metropolis (2008).
Mellon
FELLOW
Candice Jansen conducted her doctoral research at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, as a PhD fellow in Art History. Her dissertation, COLOURED BLACK: The Life & Works of South African Photographers, Cedric Nunn and Ernest Cole (2019) was completed at Northwestern University during her Mellon fellowship. Jansen is a New Archival Visions Digital Curatorial Fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape.
THE UNIVERSITY ANd ITS PUBLICs:
NORTH, SOUTH, AND IN BETWEEN
Penelope Deutscher is a Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University and the Associate Director of Northwestern’s Critical Theory Cluster. In this capacity, she acted as the principal investigator and facilitator of Critical Theory in the Global South, which was awarded funding in 2015 by the Mellon Foundation to establish the International Consortium for Critical Theory Programs. Deutscher specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary French philosophy and in gender and sexuality studies. Her most recent publications are Foucault’s Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason and two co-edited collections, Foucault/Derrida: Fifty Years On (co-edited with Olivia Custer and Samir Haddad) and Critical Theory in Critical Times (co-edited with Cristina Lafont).
consultantation:
Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui is a Professor of American Studies and Comparative Literature, Rutgers University.
Andrew Parker is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Rutgers. His research concerns the history and practices of literary theory, especially post-war theory in France and its world-wide dissemination. His most recent book is The Theorist’s Mother, which attends to traces of the maternal in the lives and works of canonical theorists from Marx and Freud to Lacan and Derrida. He was the editor and co-translator of Jacques Ranciere’s The Philosopher and His Poor, and has co-edited five other collections of essays. A new book project, “Ventriloquisms,” explores interactions between body and voice across different literary traditions and media forms.
Marisa Belausteguigoitia is a Professor at the School of Humanities at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), where she also acts as coordinator of Graduate Studies curricular innovation on gender, critical theory, and cultural critique and as an advisor to the Comisión de Derechos Humanos del Distrito Federal (CDHDF), Commission on Human Rights of México City. She analyzes the relationship between critical pedagogies and artistic and juridical practices from a gender perspective to focus on women’s access to justice.
Grad Students
Rafael Vizcaino finished his PhD in Philosophy from Rutgers University. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University.
Paulina Barrios is a PhD candidate in the
Comparative Literature Department at Rutgers University.
Carmen De Schryver finished her PhD in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University. Currently, she is the Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, CT.
Zorimar Rivera Montes is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University.
Taylor Rogers finished her PhD in Philosophy at Northwestern University. Currently, she teaches philosophy at Loyola University, Chicago.
Alonso Alcaron Mugica is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at UNAM.
Alicia V. Nuñez is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University.
Tania Gisel Tovar Cervantes is a PhD candidate in the Department of
Latin American Studies at UNAM.
Nictexa Ytza is a student at UNAM.
Anaid Martínez is a student at UNAM.
CRITICAL EPISTEMOLOGY,
KNOWING THROUGH GENDER
AND THE DECOLONIAL
José Medina is the Walter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy and affiliated faculty in the Critical Theory Cluster and the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University. He works in critical race and gender/queer theory, communication theory, critical epistemology, and political philosophy. His books include Speaking from Elsewhere (SUNY Press, 2006), and The Epistemology of Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2012), which received the 2012 North-American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award. His current projects in critical race theory, social epistemology, and gender and queer theory focus on how social perception and the social imagination contribute to the formation of vulnerabilities to different kinds of violence and oppression.
Mellon
PostdOCTORAL
FELLOW
Cintia Martínez Velasco received her PhD in Philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She is an Assitant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Oregon. Prior, she taught at the UNAM the course Debates on Feminist Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Literature. Velasco is a board member of the International Association of Women Philosophers. The main topics of her research are feminist and decolonial philosophy, with special focus on third-wave feminism, Latin American philosophy, and metaphysics of sex and gender. Velasco has organized national and international conferences on feminist philosophy, most recently, the Workshop on Gender, Ethics and Politics (2017) and the International Congress of Feminism and Marxism: Neoliberalism and Work (2018-2019).
Mellon
FELLOW
Taylor Rogers is a decolonial feminist scholar and artist in Chicago. Currently, she teaches Philosophy at Loyola University while pursuing collaborative art projects. Dr. Rogers finished her PhD in Philosophy at Northwestern University, where she researched the role of emotional numbness in perpetuating oppression. Her latest multi-media research project with Indiana-based cinematographer Lillian Walker, NOA: A Music Film, explores the liberatory role of grief using philosophy, music, dance, poetry, and more. She is working on a book project, Knowing How to Feel, which can be seen as the literary counterpart to the music film. Dr. Rogers has released three full-length albums to date and has toured all over the US performing in various Midwest festivals.
HACER ESCUELA/INVENTING SCHOOL:
RETHINKING THE PEDAGOGY OF CRITICAL THEORY
Samir Haddad is a Professor in the Philosophy Department at Fordham University. Haddad focuses on issues such as hospitality, justice, normativity, violence, friendship, and birth, which he reads as deeply political. In his book, Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy (2013), Haddad develops a general theory of inheritance and shows how it is essential to democratic action. He transforms Derrida's well-known idea of "democracy to come" into active engagement with democratic traditions.
Ariana Gonzalez Stokas is a scholar, researcher, and consultant focused on co-creating anti-oppressive and reparative knowledge-producing institutions. She currently serves as an independent consultant and as an associate with the Peterson Rudgers Group focusing on leadership and strategic change. She brings creativity and inventiveness to institutional diversity and inclusion efforts committed to making space for difference to ignite transformative change. Her book, Reparative Universities Why Diversity Alone Won't Solve Racism in Higher Ed was published in 2023 by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Jason Wozniak teaches graduate courses focused on higher education philosophy and history for the Department of Educational Foundations and Policy Studies at West Chester University. His research focuses on critical theory analyses of financial debt and education theory and practice. He is completing his first book, provisionally titled, The Mis-Education of the Indebted Student. In addition, Jason is the founder and Co-Director of The Latin American Philosophy of Education Society.
indian ocean epistemologies
Mellon FELLOW
Evan Mwangi is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University, where he also teaches in the Program of African Studies. He is the author of Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (2009), Translation in African Contexts (2017), and The Postcolonial Animal: African Literature and Posthuman Ethics (2019). Mwangi is currently at work on two new book projects: one exploring the global re-writings of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the other on Indian Ocean.
Tina Steiner is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Stellenbosch University (South Africa). She studied at the University of Cape Town where she obtained her PhD. She teaches African literature, translation studies, postcolonial studies and narratives of migration. She has published articles and chapters on Leila Aboulela, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Jamal Mahjoub, Sophia Mustafa, Ishtiyaq Shukri, and MG Vassanji. Her monograph Translated People, Translated Texts: Language and Migration in Contemporary African Fiction appeared in 2009.
Serah Namulisa Kasembeli visited Northwestern in the fall of 2017 and the winter of 2018 as part of her Mellon fellowship. and completed her PhD in English (Stellenbosch University, South Africa). Her dissertation focused on concepts of the archive, memory, trauma, and hauntology in post-apartheid literature as an embodiment of slavery’s silenced history in the post-apartheid nation. She is author of a number of journal articles in these areas, a cultural studies scholar, and an independent research consultant.
APPROPRIATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Huey Copeland is the BFC Presidential Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. At the time of the project, he was an Associate Professor of Art History and affiliated faculty in the Critical Theory Cluster, the Department of African American Studies, the Department of Art Theory & Practice, and the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Northwestern. Focusing on modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on articulations of blackness in the Western visual field, Copeland is the author of Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (2013), as well as numerous articles and chapters.
Mellon FELLOW
Sampada Aranke is an Assistant Professor in the Art History, Theory, Criticism Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research interests include performance theories of embodiment, visual culture, and black cultural and aesthetic theory. Her work has been published in e-flux, Artforum, Art Journal, ASAP/J, October, and Trans-Scripts: An Interdisciplinary Online Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine. She has written catalogue essays for Sadie Barnette, Rashid Johnson, Faith Ringgold, Kambui Olujimi, Sable Elyse Smith, and Zachary Fabri. She is the author of Death's Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power.
Athi Mongezeleli Joja is an art critic based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
He has an MFA from Wits University in Johannesburg, where he studied the writing of the late South African art critic Colin Richards. Joja has written for magazines and journals including Africanah, Artforum, Contemporary and (C&), The Mail, and Guardian. As a member of the arts collective Gugulective, Joja has also taken part in events such as the Creative Time Summit. He was a Mellon fellow at Northwestern University in 2018.
AFTER FOUCAULT:
GENDER AND BIOPOLITICS IN THE AMERICAS
Alejandra Uslenghi is an Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Comparative Literary Studies. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University and her MA from New School for Social Research. She is the author of Latin America at fin-de-siècle Universal Exhibitions. Modern Cultures of Visuality (Palgrave, New Directions in Latino American Cultures, 2016) and the editor of Walter Benjamin. Culturas de la imagen (Eterna Cadencia, Buenos Aires, 2011). She co-edited a special issue of Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies on Argentine Modern Photography (2015).
Mellon
FELLOW
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Penelope Deutscher is a Professor of Philosophy and the Associate Director of Northwestern’s Critical Theory Cluster. Deutscher specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary French philosophy and in gender and sexuality studies. Her most recent publications are Foucault’s Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason and two co-edited collections, Foucault/Derrida: Fifty Years On (co-edited with Olivia Custer and Samir Haddad) and Critical Theory in Critical Times (co-edited with Cristina Lafont).
Daniel Link is Director of the Maestría en Estudios Literarios Latinoamericanos (Master’s in Latin American Literary Studies) at the Universidad Tres de Febrero in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His research is situated at the intersection of Latin American thought, French and German thought, and gender and sexuality studies. Link is the author of numerous monographs, most recently Suturas: Imágenes, escritura, vida (2015).
Andrés Mendieta holds a B.A in Communication Studies from the National University of La Plata (UNLP) and an M.A in Gender Studies from the National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he also teaches seminars in queer and trans* studies. He participates as a research member of the international research project Trans.Arch: Archives in Transition, funded by the European Union. Mendieta joined Northwestern in the fall of 2022 as a PhD scholar in Spanish and Portuguese.
AESTHETICS AND THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL THEOLOGY
Peter Fenves, the Joan and Sarepta Harrison Professor of Literature, is Professor of German, Comparative Literary Studies, Jewish Studies, and Asian Languages and Cultures. He is the author of many books, among them, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford University Press, 2010) and Walter Benjamin entre los filósofos (Palinodia, 2017). Professor Fenves is also the editor of Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Kant, Transformative Critique by Derrida (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), the co-editor of The Spirit of Poesy: Essays on Jewish and German Literature and Philosophy in Honor of Géza von Molnár (Northwestern University Press, 2000), and Points of Departure: Samuel Weber Between Spectrality and Reading (Northwestern University Press, 2016).
Eduardo Sabrovsky is Professor at the Instituto de Humanidades, Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile. His research and teaching focus on political theology and Chilean politics. Most recently, Sabrovsky published Modernity as Exception and Miracle (Ensayos sobre politíca y filosofía del acontecimiento; Chile, tiempos interesantes: A 40 años del Golpe Militar; and De l'extraordinaire: Nominalisme et modernité.) with an introduction by Peter Fenves (SUNY Press, 2020).
Rodrigo Farías Rivas studied Psychology and Philosophy at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is a Clinical Psychologist and graduated from Philosophy with a thesis dealing with the possibility of a theoretical continuity between Wittgenstein and Lacan. In 2016, he began his doctoral studies in the joint PhD program in Philosophy offered by Diego Portales University in Chile and Leiden University in the Netherlands, with a research project dealing with Nietzsche and Lacan. As the Mellon Fellow, Rivas assisted Professor Fenves in the development of project syllabi, participated in seminars, worked on his dissertation prospectus, and provided pre-publication assistance to Critical Times.
Mellon FELLOW
Javier Burdman was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Mainat the time of the project. Prior, He completed his PhD in Political Science at Northwestern University. Burdman participated with Eduardo and Peter Fenves in the inaugural teach-in workshop, “Aesthetics and the Critique of Political Theology." For the event, he also translated Sabrovsky’s essay, “Carl Schmitt as His Own Most Enemy.” Burdman is the translator of Sabrovsky's De lo extraordinario. Burdman is a tenured Research Fellow at the School for Interdisciplinary Social Studies of the National University of San Martin in Argentina, funded by the Argentine National Research Council.
Technologiesof Critique:
NEW SOURCES FOR CRITICAL THEORY
Paul North writes and teaches on literature and other media, continental philosophy, literary and critical theory. His last book, The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation (Stanford) came out in 2015. He is the co-Editor of Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory (Fordham University Press). Previously, he published The Problem of Distraction (Stanford 2012). A new book, The Logic of Likeness: On Homeotics (Zone Books), is forthcoming. He runs an interdisciplinary workshop on critical theory. Currently, he is co-editing with Paul Reitter of OSU an updated edition of Marx’s Capital in a new translation.
Willy Thayer is a full professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educación (Santiago de Chile). He is also Professor in the Master of Visual Arts and the Master of Documentary Film programs, both at the University of Chile. He is the author of The Unmodern Crisis of the Modern University (Cuarto Propio, Santiago, 1996, UFMG, Brazil, 2001), The Repeated Fragment: Writings in a State of Exception (Heavy Metals, 2006), Critical Technologies: Between Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze (Heavy Metals, 2010, Fordham Press 2018), and The Varnish of the Skeleton (Palinodia, 2011).
Mellon FELLOWs
Matías Sánchez, a graduate student in Philosophy at Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educación (UMCE), visited Yale in Fall 2020. His graduate thesis was "Maquiavelo y la política (im)posible. El resto inadministrable" ("Machiavelli and (Im)Possible Politics: The Unmanageable Remainder"). He is the author of "Nietzsche. Nosotros, los nuevamente sin temor," which appears in the volume Perspectivas del pensar filosófico. Entre Santiago y Valparaíso, edited by José Jara, Lenin Pizarro, and Adolfo Vera.
Vanessa Gubbins completed her PhD at Yale’s Comparative Literature Department. In 2022, she was appointed as Assistant Professor in Romance Studies at Cornell University. She writes and teaches about Latin American literature of the Andean Region and the Southern Cone, poetics and poetologies, critical theory and critical theory in the Global South, Andean and European philosophies, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminist theories, and Third Cinema.
CIRCULATING ANARCHISMS AND MARXISMS IN THE ANDES
Jorge Coronado is a Professor of modern Latin American and Andean literatures and cultures. His undergraduate courses range across the 19th and 20th centuries and draw from various disciplines and cultural practices, such as history, archaeology, anthropology, music, photography, and literature. His graduate courses focus on literary and cultural theory and Andean studies. He is the author of The Andes Imagined: Indigenismo, Society, and Modernity (Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas series. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009) and Portraits in the Andes: Photography and Agency, 1900-1950 (Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas series. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018).
Mellon FELLOW
Victor Vich is widely esteemed as one of the most insightful and original writers and academics in Perú today, He is an Associate Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) and a Principal Investigator at the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP). His interdisciplinary approach to understanding Perú's complex literary, cultural, and political histories and current landscape has resulted in a number of groundbreaking studies, and he was instrumental in establishing at PUCP an interdisciplinary master’s degree program in cultural studies.
Sheyla Liliana Huyhua Muñoz is working on her M.A. in Cultural Studies at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She is interested in analyzing how Peruvian society constructs the sense of politics. Her research focuses on how modernity reduces complex categories such as memory, reconciliation, forgiveness, justice and democracy to a simple metaphysical exercise. Her theoretical framework is related to deconstruction. She approaches Peruvian political conflicts not from the official discourse, but from what can not be verbalized or quantified by it. Her master's project involves cultural studies and philosophy, aiming to explain why is it difficult to understand political conflicts beyond the limits of rational discourse and its ethical consequences. Sheyla visited Northwestern in the fall of 2018.
decolonizing critical theory
Mellon FELLOWs
Alejandra Uslenghi is an Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Comparative Literary Studies. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University and her MA from The New School for Social Research. She is the author of Latin America at fin-de-siècle Universal Exhibitions. Modern Cultures of Visuality (Palgrave, New Directions in Latino American Cultures, 2016) and the editor of Walter Benjamin. Culturas de la imagen (Eterna Cadencia, Buenos Aires, 2011). She co-edited a special issue of Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies on Argentine Modern Photography (2015).
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Penelope Deutscher is a Professor of Philosophy and the Associate Director of Northwestern’s Critical Theory Cluster. Deutscher specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary French philosophy and in gender and sexuality studies. Her most recent publications are Foucault’s Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason and two co-edited collections, Foucault/Derrida: Fifty Years On (co-edited with Olivia Custer and Samir Haddad) and Critical Theory in Critical Times (co-edited with Cristina Lafont).
Carmen De Schryver is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. In her capacity as a Northwestern Mellon fellow, De Schryver organized the 2021 conference in the area of decolonial thought, “Decolonizing the University, Decolonizing the Universal." Her research explores modes of cross-cultural reading and develops a conception of decolonial universality.
Andrés Mendieta holds a B.A in Communication Studies from the National University of La Plata (UNLP) and an M.A in Gender Studies from the National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he also teaches seminars in queer and trans* studies. He participates as a research member of the international research project Trans.Arch: Archives in Transition, funded by the European Union. Mendieta joined Northwestern in the fall of 2022 as a PhD scholar in Spanish and Portuguese.