Society for Critical Exchange

THEORY INSTITUTE

February 15-18, 2024

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 2024 Institute The Society for Critical Exchange (SCE), this year co-sponsored by Florida State University’s Department of English and the University of Houston, Victoria, is pleased to announce the topic of its fifteenth annual Theory Institute:

Critical Environments

Clint Burnham

Clint Burnham is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Recent books include Lacan and the Environment (co-edited with Paul Kingsbury); Does the Internet have an Unconscious? Slavoj Žižek and Digital Culture; and, Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street.

Mari Ruti, Climate Anxiety and Sublimation: An Argument for Eco-Sabotage (and Cézanne’s Apples)

Clint Burnham

Michael F. Miller

Michael F. Miller teaches literature and literary theory in the Department of English Language and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is co-editor of the collection Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism, and his work has appeared in many venues including New Literary History, Radical Philosophy, symploke, and Arizona Quarterly, among others.

Technical Rationality and the Ecological Turn

Michael F. Miller

Edward Dallis-Comentale

Edward Dallis-Comentale is Professor of English at Indiana University. His research focuses on modernist art and literature, critical theory, popular culture, and media studies. He is the author of Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde; and, Sweet Air: Modernism, Regionalism, and American Popular Song.

Total Admin: Th e College Campus as Critical Environment

Edward Dallis-Comentale

Ken Saltman

Kenneth Saltman is Professor of Educational Policy Studies at University of Illinois Chicago. He is the author most recently of The Alienation of Fact; The Swindle of Innovative Educational Finance; and, Scripted Bodies. His talk draws from his forthcoming book The Disaster of Resilience.

The Disaster of Resilience

Ken Saltman

Jeffrey R. Di Leo

Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria. He is founder and editor of symploke, and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange and its Theory Institute. His recent books include Catastrophe and Higher Education; Vinyl theory; Happiness; and, Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: An Overview.

The Jargon of Critical Environments

Jeffrey R. Di Leo

Nicole Simek

Nicole Simek is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College. Her publications include Alchemies of Blood and Afro-Diasporic Fiction: Race, Kinship, and the Passion for Ontology, and Hunger and Irony in the French Caribbean: Literature, Theory, and Public Life.

The Plantationocene, or Critique under a Black Horizon

Nicole Simek

Jane Gallop

Jane Gallop is the author of more than a hundred articles and ten books. Her most recent article, “Theory, Place: Exile and Roots,” appeared in The Comparatist. Her books include Thinking Through the Body; Anecdotal Theory; The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time; and, Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus.

Eli Clare: Outsider Theory, the Environment, and Brilliant Imperfection

Jane Gallop

Alison Sperling

Alison Sperling is an Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University. Her research explores science and weird fiction, queer and feminist theory, the Anthropocene and the environmental humanities, and contemporary art.

Queer Weird Ecologies

Alison Sperling

Robin Goodman

Robin Truth Goodman is a Professor of English at Florida Statev University. Her most recent publications include Gender Commodity: Marketing Identities and the Promise of Security and Feminism as World Literature (edited collection), both published by Bloomsbury. Currently, she is working on world cinema.

Environment/Ideology

Robin Goodman

Cary Wolfe

Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University, and Founding Editor of the series Posthumanities at the University of Minnesota Press. His books include What Is Posthumanism?; Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame; and, Ecological Poetics, or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds.

“Everyone’s Gone to the Movies, Now We’re Alone at Last”: On James Turrell

Cary Wolfe

Cristina Iuli

Cristina Iuli is Associate Professor of American Literature and American Studies at Università del Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli, Italy. She specializes in modernism, the contemporary novel, literary theory, science and literature, and transatlantic studies.

Complexity Re-ordered (Critical Environments as Theoretical Pedagogy)

Cristina Iuli

Derek Woods

Derek Woods is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Media Arts at McMaster University in Canada. With Joshua Schuster, he is co-author of the book Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk. With Karen Pinkus, he is co-editor of a special issue of diacritics about terraforming.

Abstract Carbon

Derek Woods

Aaron Jaffe

Aaron Jaffe, Frances Cushing Ervin Professor of English at Florida State University, specializes in modernism, culture, and media. He is the author of Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity; The Way Things Go: An Essay on the Matter of Second Modernism; and, Spoiler Alert.

Risk Horizons & Slag Heaps

Aaron Jaffe

Zahi Zalloua

Zahi Zalloua is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and Director of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College. His recent works include Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality; Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future; and Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future.

Thinking (the) Dispossessed, or Staying with the Zero-Level of Subjectivity

Zahi Zalloua

The Institute will take place from Thursday, February 15 to Sunday, February 18 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Wakulla Springs, Florida. Additional details regarding the Society for Critical Exchange or the upcoming Theory Institute can be found at the Society for Critical Exchange’s website (http://societyforcriticalexchange.org/) or by contacting Executive Director Jeffrey R. Di Leo (dileo@symploke.org).