Core Course seminars

The purpose of this seminar is to sample a range of different approaches to the burgeoning field of cultural history. The interdisciplinary 'foundations' of cultural history will be sampled, including the work of Foucault, microhistory (Ginzburg) and ethnography (Geertz), and the so-called 'linguistic turn' which reconfigured the relation between literature and history in the 1980s. Sessions will then focus upon the 'social history of ideas' (Darnton), the question of the everyday, including the theoretical and cultural writings of Michel de Certeau and his concepts of 'strategies' and 'tactics', and finally a range of more contemporary concerns, from the rapidly-growing field of cultural memory studies, to material culture, and histories of the emotions. Seminars will focus on key readings from the field and will comprise informal student presentations.

This seminar offers a general introduction to Marxist and post-Marxist methods of cultural (mainly literary) analysis. Its aim is to familiarize students with the most important theories – from historical materialism as defined by Marx and Engels to Adorno’s aesthetic theory – that have emphasized the historicity of texts and the socio-political significance of literature as well as literary interpretation. Among other things, this seminar will address the following questions: How can Marxist interpretations avoid the pitfalls of economic determinism? Can they accommodate notions of authorial agency, creativity, originality, “greatness”? What makes a literary text politically important? How can a work of art both subvert and perpetuate “hegemonic” social and political conditions? What is critical about Critical Theory? 

This seminar focuses on modern (and postmodern) developments in theories of power, from discipline, hegemony and biopolitics to the purported biopower of “we, the multitude”, with our contemporary forms of networked, immaterial or “affective” labour. We will look at the evolution of Foucault’s thought on the modern intersection of disciplinary power and biopolitical forms of governmentality, alongside the parallel evolution of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, and their confluence in the contemporary political theories of Hardt and Negri (Empire and Multitude). In mapping out these evolutions of power and its dissemination throughout the social body and the cultural field, we will also engage critically with Agamben’s work on “bare life”, Esposito’s account of the “immunization paradigm”, Mbembe’s extrapolation of biopolitics into the realm of necropolitics, or the politics of death, and the possible rise of a “posthegemonic” political order. Furthermore, we shall be looking at the contestation of some of these theories by the likes of Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Zizek, and by critical race theorists who have sought to flesh out the hidden blindspots of the biopolitical paradigm. Throughout we shall keep a keen eye on the application of these ideas to the realm of cultural studies, and you will be encouraged to bring to the table your own examples of texts and films that are working through these profound political mutations of the socio-political order in the modern era. 

This seminar series explores forms of theoretical, critical, and critical-creative work through which scholars, writers, activists and artists from the United States and the Caribbean have responded to the historical fact and ongoing reach of the mass transatlantic transportation of kidnapped Africans and their enslavement in the Americas. The work considered accordingly confronts the fundamental challenges to historiography, criticism, and creativity posed by the Middle Passage, chattel slavery, and forced labour in the plantations, and develops specific strategies to respond rigorously and combatively to the scale of these challenges. Following the approach of those studied, the seminar invokes the history, architecture, and mode of production of the plantation as drawing together sites of racialized abuse in the US and the Caribbean and the perpetuation of this regime in continuing forms of racial injustice and environmental destruction. Engaging the notion of the “Plantationocene”, notably as aligned with critiques of the so-called “Anthropocene”, the seminar further follows those studied by deploying the concept of ecology to gather, honour, and analyse modes of resistance and survival within and against this regime. 

The first session of the series provides sustained focus on the work of Saidiya Hartman, whose work both establishes the historiographical challenge posed by the rupture of the Middle Passage and the archival absenting especially of the voices of enslaved women, and develops specific critical strategies to address this challenge, in the context of ongoing racial injustice theorized by Hartman as the “afterlife of slavery”. With this framework in place, session 2 then introduces for comparison approaches formulated by Christina Sharpe and Fred Moten. Designed to serve similar ends, these approaches emphasize in particular the necessity for criticism to invent forms of seeing and hearing, of reading and writing, which might disclose and, in some cases, swerve the racializing logic persisting in contemporary documents and images. Informed by the concept of the “Plantationocene”, as developed by Anna Tsing (along with Donna Haraway) and expanded by Malcom Ferdinand, and understood as critical alternative to the “Anthropocene” (in harmony especially with the work of Kathryn Yusoff), session 3 then introduces the historical reality, spatial organization, and phenomenological effectivity of the plantation regime. Through the work of Caribbean thinkers Sylvia Wynter, Edward Kamau Braithwaite, and Ferdinand himself, the session brings out both the connections made by these thinkers between this regime’s exploitation of forced labour, its monocultural agriculture, and its global extension, and their attention to practices of resistance to this continuum, from alternative agricultural forms, to marronage, to historical research and critical writing.  The final session continues this focus on practices and ecologies of resistance: taking Christina Sharpe’s use of the term “ecology” to describe forms of survival and combat in the wake of the plantations’ regime of enslavement, exploitation, and racialized violence, the session dwells with creative works – including poetry, visual art, and essay-writing – which engage specific formal practices in this way, and so “produce out of the weather their own ecologies”. In addition to the works listed for this session, students will be encouraged to share other works, in any medium, which for them embody such an approach.

These seminars will provide an introduction to medieval and early modern manuscripts; transcription and editing of medieval texts; editing medieval and early modern texts; writing and printing in pre-modern Europe and book design.

The mini-seminars on ‘Gender: Theory and History’ are designed to equip you with the critical and research tools needed to develop your research on gender issues across a variety of fields, genres, and languages. They will offer an exploration into the notion and category of ‘gender’ and its relevance across the centuries (from the Medieval times to the present) and across different contexts, traditions, subjects, and disciplines. 

It will allow students to explore the various meanings, understandings and implications of gender, its uses in the construction of ‘identities’, and its representation, across literature, history, art, cinema, and language. It will provide students with a critical and theoretical knowledge of gender that includes also feminist theory, queer theory, transgender/trans* theory, and critical sexuality studies. 

The nature and scope of the ‘Gender: Theory and History’ mini-seminars is to offer students both the option of in-depth investigation into gender-related issues and topics, and to transcend linguistic, national, and chronological divisions to pose broader comparative questions. Students interested in the subject will be able to create a Gender pathway within the MPhil, by taking also the module ‘Approaches to Gender’ taught during Lent term, as well as focusing on gender-related topics within other modules.

This course offers an intersectional introduction to thinking about narrative, power, and knowledge. In the first two seminars we will discuss theories of how race, class, gender, and other power relations determine what is ‘known’, exploring Mills’ and others’ understanding of epistemology as a ‘privileged universalization of the experience and outlook of a very limited (particularistic) sector of humanity – largely white, male, and propertied’ (Mills, 1988). We will also explore the development of the concept of epistemic injustice. In the second two seminars we will then address the possibilities and problems of alternative epistemologies and modes of narrative resistance. 

Participants are invited to bring their own experience and ideas to the seminar and to suggest additional or alternative reading. 

This seminar will interrogate the way in which some of the most important recent and contemporary French philosophers have taken up the question of ‘feeling’ and ‘sensation’ as a means of interrogating our relation to, and knowledge of, shared worldly existence. For each of these thinkers the question of feeling or aesthesis opens onto broader considerations concerning the status of philosophical thought, its aesthetic dimension, and the relation of these both to artistic presentation and to life itself understood more generally as being technical through and through. Via readings of Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou and the mid-twentieth century philosopher of biology Georges Canguilhem students will be encouraged to think these issues through in the context of wider questions of concerning literary and art criticism and the relation of the arts to the life sciences more generally. They will also be introduced to some of the key developments within French thought since the 1990s.