Scholars from across the world gathered at Cornell June 16-17 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the School of Criticism and Theory (SCT), a six-week summer program that serves as a hub for interdisciplinary inquiry in the humanities and social sciences.
Founded in 1976 by literary critics Murray Krieger, professor at the University of California, Irvine, and Hazard Adams, professor at the University of Washington, SCT was created to allow scholars working across different “theoretical camps” related to literature and culture to engage in sustained dialogue. Fifty years later, that founding mission continues.
Begun at Irvine, the SCT moved to Northwestern University and Dartmouth College, but has been housed at Cornell since 1997. The SCT offers seminars, public lectures and colloquia that bring together between 60-80 faculty members and graduate students each year from fields ranging from literature and philosophy to anthropology and political theory.
“The School of Criticism and Theory has made Cornell a center of inspiration and innovation in the humanities for a half century, and its participants consistently attest to their experience here as pivotal for their intellectual lives,” said Derk Pereboom, senior associate dean for arts and humanities in the College of Arts & Sciences and the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Ethics. “The College of Arts and Sciences is very pleased to provide funding stability for SCT into the future.”
The SCT has become known as a hub for cross-disciplinary conversations in the critical humanities, said Jason Frank, the John L. Senior Professor of Government (A&S), who first attended SCT as a graduate student in 1998 and is teaching in this summer’s session. “The themes the seminars are dealing with are often themes that are very publicly relevant. They have a political relevance, a social relevance. They deal with real questions and issues in our lives.”
Frank said such exchanges often reshape how participants understand their own work. “You have productively surprising conversations with people about works or theories you thought you knew very well,” he said. “Those discussions show that these rich texts have so many different avenues into them, from people who don’t have the same guiding questions that you have in your own discipline.”
What began as a forum grounded in literary theory has expanded alongside movements such as structuralism, deconstruction, new historicism, feminist theory and cultural studies. Today, SCT seminars regularly address topics such as race, environmental crisis and democracy. Notable speakers over the years have included Edward Said, Hortence Spillers, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Martha Nussbaum, Etienne Balibar, Stanley Fish and Sundar Sarukkai.
For Jonathan Boyarin, the Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies (A&S) who attended SCT in 1988, the experience was transformative. “It was richer critical intellectual work and harder work than I had ever done in my life,” Boyarin said. “It helped me find ways to articulate the politics of Jewishness with postcolonial and feminist critiques.”
Boyarin said that the program’s interdisciplinary structure remains one of its defining strengths. “Participants are working with people from different disciplines, different countries, different backgrounds,” he said.
Carolyn M. Rouse, the Ritter Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, has been serving as director for the past three years, having been a seminar leader in the 2010s.
"Carolyn's energetic and engaged leadership of SCT, her expansive vision of the humanities and her clear sense of how theory matters in our scholarship has been central to securing SCT's future moving forward," said Durba Ghosh, Taylor Family Director of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell and professor in the Department of History (A&S).
Caroline Levine, the David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities in the Department of Literatures in English (A&S), will be taking over this fall as the new director of SCT.
“The School of Criticism and Theory has been one of the world’s most exciting sites for bringing fundamental questions of interpretation to the fore and debating them,” Levine said. “It’s not a single voice speaking – it’s an international community, and that has a long tail in classrooms around the world.”
Levine also pointed to SCT’s continuing relevance at a time when humanities departments face increasing pressures. “People need a place to come and think broadly,” she said. “If we lose spaces like this, we lose something vital—not just for academia, but for the larger world.”
Jonathan Culler, the Class of 1916 Professor Emeritus in the Department of Literatures in English (A&S), highlighted how the program has evolved. “There was a time when critical theory in literature was a new thing,” Culler said. “Over the years, it has broadened considerably, moving beyond a narrow focus on European thinkers to bring in theorists from across the world and a wider range of concerns around issues such as race and gender.”
Levine said her hopes are to use SCT as a vehicle to move humanists toward action. “What can the humanities help to build? How can the humanities guide political decision making?” she said. “We’re at a time when there’s such misunderstanding, and frankly misinformation, about what we do. But we’re constantly retooling, we’re talking about far-reaching questions. And not from a single ideology or a single set of positions, but with a constant churning of ideas.”
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