Critical Theory

Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion

In 1964, heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay announced to the world that he was a member of the Nation of Islam. Renamed Muhammad Ali by the Nation’s leader, the boxer faced a slew of criticism about his chosen faith. The idea that he had been brainwashed was among the most pernicious explanations for his conversion and his subsequent defiance of the draft for the American war in Vietnam. These allegations of mind control—and Ali’s defiant response to them—form a pivotal moment in American conversations about faith, race, and political authenticity.

Rebecca L. Davis is the Miller Family Endowed Early Career Professor of History at the University of Delaware, where she holds a joint appointment in the Department of Women and Gender Studies. A specialist in histories of sexuality, gender, religion, and American culture, she is a recipient of a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her most recent book is Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics from the University of North Carolina Press, 2021. She is at work on a single-volume history of sex in America.

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and cosponsored by the Institute of Governmental Studies.

I Know the Truth: Muhammad Ali, Brainwashing, and the Racial Politics... | Rebecca Davis | 3/3/22

A Buddhist Sensibility generates a novel perspective on Tibetan Buddhist history by focusing on aesthetics—encompassing the fields of music, visual arts, poetry, dance, and even the olfactory sense through incense production. Through the case study of this monastic history, Townsend argues that the Buddhist engagement with and cultivation of the senses connects the spheres of religion and the secular.

Mindröling monastery’s founders were Tibetan aristocrats renowned for their Buddhist and worldly expertise and distinctive sensibility. Their reputation attracted laypeople to study the arts and sciences at Mindröling, in preparation for careers as politicians and bureaucrats. At the same time, Mindröling was a haven for Buddhist renunciants and a stage for large-scale public ritual performances designed to solidify the early modern Tibetan polity under the Fifth Dalai Lama. The founders of Mindröling developed a particularly Tibetan Buddhist mode of cosmopolitanism, enabling them to create a complex institution that occupied apparently paradoxical positions vis-à-vis Buddhist cultural production and renunciation at a formative historical moment.

Townsend draws evidence from diverse Tibetan literary genres, including monastic histories, letters, biographies, poetry, and curricula. As she interprets and contextualizes these texts, she poses questions about the senses, materiality, and worldly engagements to develop a cultural history of early modern Tibet. The book invites scholars and students to recognize aesthetics as an essential aspect of Tibetan Buddhism. It also offers non-specialists an alternative to reductive perspectives on Tibet and Buddhism that tend to assume Buddhists wholly reject materiality and worldly life.

Dominique Townsend is Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies at Bard College. She is the author of A Buddhist Sensibility: Aesthetic Education at Tibet’s Mindröling Monastery (Columbia University Press, 2021). In addition to her academic work, she is also the author of a collection of poems, The Weather & Our Tempers (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013), and a children’s book about Buddhism, Shantideva: How to Wake Up a Hero (Wisdom Publications, 2015). Her research interests include Tibetan Buddhist aesthetics, poetics, and translation.

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and co-sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of History.

A Buddhist Sensibility | Dominique Townsend and Stacey Van Vleet | 3/15/22

This lecture investigates democratic approaches to legal formulations in Islam from the perspective of the principle of consensus. Accepted as having probative force in practically all Islamic legal traditions, the principle is often understood in pre-modern and modern literature as a means of establishing positive law by appeal to the customary practices in a region and/or the shared legal opinions of a generation of scholars. As such, it also emerges as a vehicle for establishing and perpetuating normative practices and for narrowing the scope for legal change. The intricacies of theoretical reflections on consensus—as opposed to its practical legal applications—reveal a rather different perspective. In the Islamic legal-theoretical tradition, consensus can be read as an agreement on a shared hypothetical system of argumentation. Inasmuch as each legal tradition within Islam has a consensus on the hypothetical validity of each alternative system as an internally consistent set of propositions, it grants the possibility of multiple modes of legal discourse. This lecture explores certain theories of consensus—often dubbed “compound consensus” in the tradition—as democratic grounds for legal disruption.

Asad Q. Ahmed is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on early Islamic social history and post-classical Islamic intellectual history. In the latter area, his investigations relate to the history of logic, philosophy, science, and legal theories in Islam. He is the author of The Religious Elite of the Early Islamic Hijaz, Avicenna’s Deliverance: Logic, and Palimpsests of Themselves: Logic and Commentary in Postclassical Muslim South Asia.

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation

Consensus and Early Islamic Law | Asad Ahmed | 4/12/22

Voting from the Rooftops: Reflections on Religion and Politics from Mughal India

Abhishek Kaicker is a historian of Persianate South Asia (c. 1200-1900) with expertise in the history of the Mughal empire. He is interested in questions of intellectual history and the history of concepts; early modern global history; religion, politics and the city; and more generally in the continuities between precolonial and postcolonial south Asia. 

His first book, The King the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi (OUP 2020) shows how ordinary urbanites emerged as assertive political subjects in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) over the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is now engaged in two new major research projects: one, a prehistory of the British conquest of Bengal in 1757 from the perspective of the Mughal empire; and another on the transformation of Mughal modes of popular politics into modern modes of communalism in North India under colonial rule in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is also writing a biography of Anand Ram Mukhlis, an eighteenth-century courtier, scribe, essayist, diarist, poet, connoisseur, gourmand, oenophile and inveterate aficionado of all things Delhi. 

Together with Professors Asad Ahmed (Berkeley) and Lawrence McCrea (Cornell), Professor Kaicker is an editor of the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, a new peer-reviewed venue for emerging conversations on the intellectual history and culture of premodern South Asia.

Abhishek Kaicker earned his PhD from Columbia University and completed his MA at University of British Columbia.

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation

Voting from the Rooftops: Reflections on Religion and Politics... | Abhishek Kaicker | 4/27/22

Indigenous Catholics and Spanish missionaries in Mexico leveraged different strategies for responding to the catastrophic epidemics that decimated communities over the course of the sixteenth century. Spanish missionaries fashioned themselves as frontline nurses, imagining themselves as saviors of bodies and souls. Indigenous pueblos de Indios did not surrender their health or well-being to Spanish initiative, rather they leveraged colonial religious institutions to support a system of hospitals and clinics under their charter and control. 

Jennifer Scheper Hughes is a historian of religion focusing on Latin American and Latinx religions with special consideration for the spiritual lives of Mexican and Mexican-American Catholics. She teaches courses on colonial Mexico, history of the church in Latin America, Christianity and colonialism, archival and ethnographic methods, and public history, among others.

Professor Hughes’ book, The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas (NYU 2021), considers a crisis in the church that resulted from a catastrophic epidemic that took two million lives. In the aftermath, Spanish missionaries and Indigenous Catholics articulated rival visions for the future of Christianity. Church of the Dead was named one of the top five books on religion for 2021 by Publisher’s Weekly. Professor Hughes’ first book, Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2010), traces the history of a single, sculpted image of Jesus on the cross over five centuries to explore the affective bonds that join devotional communities to vital and agentic objects of material religion.

Her articles have been published in History of Religions, Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, Nova Religio: A Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Latin American Perspectives, the Journal of Latin American and Latinx Art and Visual Culture, and Religion and the Arts, among others. She is editor of The Routledge Handbook of Material Religion, now in preparation.

With colleagues at UCLA, UCSD, and UCSC, Professor Hughes received a $1 million grant in support of the Critical Mission Studies project which centers California Indian perspectives of the colonial missions and their aftermath.

Her research has been recognized and supported through grants and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the UC Office of the President/UC Humanities Research Institute, the Luce Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Cushwa Center for Catholic Studies at Notre Dame University, and the UCR Center for Ideas and Society.

Before coming to UCR, Professor Hughes worked for the Latino Health Institute (Boston, MA) as an advocate for homeless Latinos with HIV/AIDS, at the Trauma Center for Victims of Violence and Torture in Cape Town as a translator and advocate for Angolan refugees in South Africa, as a hospital chaplain for women suffering loss of their newborns, and with the Liberation Theology base community movement in Pernambuco, Brazil.

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and co-sponsored by the Othering & Belonging Institute.

Medicine as Sacrament: Spanish and Indigenous Catholic Responses ... | Jennifer Hughes | 11/8/22

The Pastoral is Political: Abortion Travel and Religious Activism Before Roe v. Wade

Between 1967 and 1973, the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion challenged restrictive abortion laws by organizing a transnational abortion network and shepherding one of the largest medical migrations of the postwar era. This talk explores the religious history of abortion-seeking and abortion travel within and outside of the continental United States. Such journeys politicized travelers and clergy alike as they reckoned with the religious mores, medical prohibitions and laws that prohibited abortion at home and structured it abroad. In the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, understanding this history may help us anticipate the role of religious communities in securing abortion access in the future.

Gillian Frank is a historian of sexuality and religion and a visiting affiliate fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Culture, Society and Religion. He is the author of numerous academic articles on the histories of sexuality, gender and religion (which have appeared in venues like the Journal of the History of Sexuality, American Jewish History, and Gender and History), and public facing scholarship (with bylines in publications including The Washington Post, Time, Jezebel and Slate). He is co-editor of Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the 20th Century United States (UNC Press: 2018). Frank is currently at work on a manuscript called A Sacred Choice: Liberal Religion and the Struggle for Abortion Before Roe v. Wade (forthcoming UNC Press). You can listen to his podcast Sexing History–co-hosted with Lauren Gutterman–which explores how the history of sexuality shapes our present, wherever you stream your shows.

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies.

Abortion Travel and Religious Activism Before Roe v. Wade | Gillian Frank | 10/24/22

Amy Huber is Assistant Professor of Literature at the Gallatin School at New York University. More information can be found at http://criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Introduction: Judith Butler, Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley

Why War? / The Claims of the Dead: Civilian Deaths & American Tactics of War | Amy Huber | 11/10/10

The European game having finally ended, at least so he thought, Frantz Fanon argued in The Wretched of the Earth that "we today can do everything". In this lecture Mbembe reflects on the dialectics of the end/closure and boundless possibility evoked by Fanon and the ways it is played out under contemporary conditions. Using South Africa as a starting point, he will also assess the place contemporary struggles for emancipation assign to the key Fanonian concepts of time, creation and reconstitution and the extent to which they truly transcend the law of repetition, which he foresaw as the biggest threat to difference and newness.

Achille Mbembe is a Research Professor in History and Politics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, and a Visiting Professor in the Romance Studies Department and the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. More information can be found at http://criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Introduction: Judith Butler, Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley

Difference and Repetition: Reflections on the Current Political Moment | Achille Mbembe | 12/7/12

Howard Eiland has been involved since the late nineteen-eighties with the multi-volume Harvard University Press edition of the works of Walter Benjamin, an influential German writer who died in 1940 while in flight from the Nazis. He co-edited three volumes of Benjamin's Selected Writings and co-translated Benjamin's Arcades Project, and he has also translated Benjamin's Berlin Childhood around 1900 and his On Hashish. He is presently collaborating on a biography of Benjamin and preparing a translation of Benjamin’s early writings. He is a Lecturer in Literature at MIT.

Introduction: Robert Kaufman, Professor of Comparative Literature and Co-director of The Program in Critical Theory, UC Berkeley

Reality as Palimpsest: On Benjamin's Arcades Project | Howard Eiland | 4/15/10

In his analysis of two contemporary forms of violence – the death-penalty and the violent exploitation of animals – Jacques Derrida showed how deeply rooted their conceptual bases are within contemporary institutions and practices. Moreover, his analyses showed the extent to which many of the discourses which claim to oppose them are caught up in the very conceptual space which sustains the forms of violence they purport to contest. In this talk, I focus on one of the resources Derrida’s own work offers for grappling with this difficulty. Tracking the octopus which appears in one of Derrida’s texts, I sketch the long history of this creature and explore the clues it provides as to alternative models of rationality and possible modes of resistance. (Custer)

Olivia Custer completed her Doctorat d’Université at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, working on Kant’s critical philosophy under the supervision of Jacques Derrida. Her research interests revolve around the question of how to engage Kant’s philosophical legacy. She is the author of L’Exemple de Kant (Peeters, 2012), and co-author of Sexualité, Genre et Melancholie, (Campagne Première, Paris, 2009).

Introduction: Judith Butler, Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley

Reading the Hell Out of Derrida: The Octopus | Olivia Custer | 10/23/14

For his lecture “Foucault and Marx: A Disjunctive Synthesis?”, Étienne Balibar discusses connections and disjunctions between Michel Foucault and Karl Marx, using Foucault’s 1972 Collège de France lectures on La société punitive as an alternative lens for the question of “reproduction” and its relationship to class struggles. With Foucault and Marx as a starting point for a new confrontation, he also reconsiders the idea of “communism” today. Response by Judith Butler, Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Foucault and Marx: A Disjunctive Synthesis | Etienne Balibar | 12/9/14

“Politics of the Debt” is a discussion of an essay by Professor Balibar on the new configurations of the “debt economy.” The focus on debt and financialization opens our discussion to larger questions of subjectivity, subjection, and citizenship under neoliberal capitalism. “Politics of the Debt” is available in advance by emailing critical_theory@berkeley.edu. Response by Wendy Brown, Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Politics of the Debt | Etienne Balibar | 12/10/14

Partha Chatterjee is a political theorist and historian. He divides his time between Columbia University and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, where he was the Director from 1997 to 2007. He is the author of more than twenty books, monographs and edited volumes and is a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective. He as awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize for 2009 for outstanding achievements in the field of Asian studies. His books include: The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (2012), Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy (2011), The Politics of the Governed: Considerations on Political Society in Most of the World (2004); A Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal (2002); The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993), and Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (1993).

Governmentality in the East | Partha Chatterjee | 4/27/15

This lecture addresses one of the paradoxes that marks all critical thought, namely: how to engage in affirmative politics, which entails the creation of sustainable alternatives geared to the construction of social horizons of hope, while at the same time doing the work of critique, which implies resistance to the present. The relationship between creation and critique is a problem that has confronted all activists and critical theorists: how to balance the creative potential of critical thought with the dose of negative criticism and oppositional consciousness that such a stance necessarily entails. Central to this debate is the question of how to resist the present, more specifically the injustice, violence and vulgarity of the times, while being worthy of our times, so as to engage with them in a productive, albeit in oppositional and affirmative manner. This paper engages with the contextual and the conceptual aspects of this question.

Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht since 2007. She was the founding professor of Gender Studies in the Humanities at Utrecht (1988-2005) and the first scientific director of the Netherlands Research School of Women’s Studies. In 2005–2006 she served as the Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor in the Law School of Birkbeck College, University of London, and in 2001–2003 held the Jean Monnet Visiting Chair at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European Institute in Florence.

Introduction by Judith Butler. 

Affirmative Ethics, Suffering, and Generative Life | Rosi Braidotti | 3/17/16

Often defined as “presentism,” the regime of historicity of the beginning of the twenty-first century posits a kind of perpetual present, absorbing in itself both past and future. It corresponds with a neoliberal ethos that eternizes the current economic order and condemns any form of collective action. It avoids any critical elaboration of the past and promotes its reification (the “realms of memory”), neutralizing at the same time all its potentialities for a recollection oriented towards a political action in the present. Thus, in contrast with the two preceding centuries, which were shaped by the impact of the French and Russian Revolutions, the twenty-first century has begun under the sign of the eclipse of utopias. The disappearance of a visible “horizon of expectation” has generated a charged memory of the past century as a time of violence, totalitarianism and genocide, encapsulated by the image of their victims. The commemorations of May 8, 1945—the anniversary of the end of the Second World War and of the Sétif massacre in Algeria—are the mirror of three main spaces (entangled and not always geographically separated) that define the memory landscape of our global age: a Western space shaped by the remembrance of the Holocaust transformed into a “civil religion” of liberal democracy; an Eastern European space dominated by the legacy of Communism; and a postcolonial space exhuming imperial atrocities (from slavery to colonialism). The common feature of these mnemonic realms is their selective character that, focusing almost exclusively on victims, forgets the vanquished and rejects any idea of collective agency: antifascism, revolution, and anti-imperialism disappear from the history of the last two centuries. Between cultural industry and neoliberal Lebensführung, the legacy of past struggles becomes a kind of Marrano memory.

Enzo Traverso is a historian specializing in contemporary Europe with a focus on intellectual history of the twentieth century in a comparative perspective. He studied at the University of Genoa, Italy, and received his Ph.D. from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1989). He specializes in contemporary Europe, focusing on intellectual history of the twentieth century in a comparative perspective. Before coming to Cornell, he was a professor of political science at the University Jules Verne of Picardy, France, and a member of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). He has also been visiting professor at several European as well as Latin American Universities. His publications include The Origins of Nazi Violence (The New Press, 2003); Fire and Blood: The European Civil War (Verso, 2016); The End of Jewish Modernity: History of a Conservative Turn (Pluto Press, 2016); Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory (Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2016).

Presentism: The Politics of Memory in the Age of Neoliberalism | Enzo Traverso | 9/14/16

Nowhere outside of Germany has the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and others received such an enthusiastic and productive reception like in the United States. In the wake of the crisis of the New Left, the Frankfurt tradition became not just the door to a “hidden dimension,” as a volume of the 1970s put it, but also a medium through which to answer the pressing cultural and political questions of the day. Taken from a dissertation that focuses on the journals New German Critique and Telos–that is apparently the first treatment of the history of Critical Theory to make extensive use of the archival materials of Martin Jay–this talk will argue that the afterlife of Critical Theory in the United States can be studied not just as a confrontation between the present of the American readers and the historical experience engrained in the texts of Adorno and others, but also as part of a larger, historically far-reaching discussion between the Old and the New World.

Robert Zwarg studied translation (English/Spanish), philosophy and cultural studies at Leipzig University, UC Davis and Mexico City. In 2015 he completed his Ph.D. in philosophy with a dissertation on the reception of critical theory in the United States, undertaken at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture. For his research he spent ten months in 2012 at the New School for Social Research in New York and was a guest at the Mosse Program in History in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2016. He is currently a research associate at the Simon Dubnow Institue. His research interests are in twentieth century intellectual history, critical theory and the history of theory.

The Prism of Expectation: Critical Theory's Afterlife in America | Robert Zwarg | 9/26/16

Mahmood Mamdani is Director of Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) at Makerere University in Uganda. He received his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University. Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Department of Anthropology and Political Science and the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where he was also director of the Institute of African Studies from 1999 to 2004. He has taught at the University of Dar-es-Salaam (1973–1979), Makerere University (1980–1993), and University of Cape Town (1996–1999) and was the Founding Director of Centre for Basic Research in Kampala, Uganda (1987–1996). Mamdani is the author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Origins of Terror (Pantheon 2004); When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton 2001); Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton 1996); and ten other books. Mamdani was president of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) from 1999 to 2002.

Between the Scholar and the Public Intellectual: The University... | Mahmood Mamdani | 5/10/17

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi examines Foucault’s writings on the Iranian Revolution as an attempt to write the history of the present without binding commitments to a teleological historiography. Is it possible for a people to envision and desire futures uncharted by already existing schemata of history? Is it possible to think of dignity, justice, and liberty outside the cognitive maps and principles of the Enlightenment? Ghamari-Tabrizi argues that Foucault’s encounter with the Iranian revolution left a significant mark on his later works on the care of the self and the hermeneutics of the subject.

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi is Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Islam and Dissent in Postrevolutionary Iran (I.B. Tauris & Palgrave-MacMillan, 2008), Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution (OR Books & Counterpoint Press, 2016), and Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

Foucault’s Enlightenment: Islamic Revolution and the Perils... | Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi | 10/19/17

Among the strong patterns of the post-1980s period in “Western” societies is a mix of economic and political vectors marked by extractive logics. We can find such extractive logics in entities as diverse as mining and Facebook. The rise of such extractive logics is partial, but sufficiently powerful to have altered key features of our economies and societies. For instance, when mass consumption is the shaping sector of our economies (until about the 1980s) even the nastiest corporation wanted the sons and daughters to do better than their parents so they would consume more — and supported government initiatives that transferred money to households directly and indirectly. This began to change with the privatizations, deregulations, and the rise of finance/financialization in the 1980s. One way of putting it is to emphasize the extractive character of leading economic sectors. How did Google make its first billion so fast and so unencumbered by all kinds of traditional constraints? It got information about all of us for free and then sold it to businesses. I want to argue that these are all instances of the rise of extractive logic. I will focus especially on finance and its sharp differences from traditional banking (which was/is basically commerce: it sells something (money) for a price. A second aspect I want to emphasize is the extent to which our major categories of analysis do not help us track the trajectories of that which is expelled. To a large extent these categories were developed at a time when mass consumption was dominant and more and more people and households became part of that mass consumption logic. But since the 1980s this dominance of mass consumption has been weakening and other logics have become dominant. One instance of the latter is the financializing of a rapidly growing range of material and immaterial elements in our political economies. Elsewhere I have developed the notion of expulsions into a category for analysis (Expulsions, Harvard University Press/Belknap).

Saskia Sassen is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, where she is also a Member of the Committee on Global Thought. Her new book is Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard University Press 2014). Recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages ( Princeton University Press 2008), A Sociology of Globalization (W.W.Norton 2007), and the 4th fully updated edition of Cities in a World Economy (Sage 2012). Among older books are The Global City (Princeton University Press 1991/2001), and Guests and Aliens (New Press 1999). Her books are translated into over 20 languages. She is the recipient of diverse awards and mentions, including multiple doctor honoris causa, named lectures, and being selected as one of the top global thinkers on diverse lists. Most recently she was awarded the Principe de Asturias 2013 Prize in the Social Sciences and made a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Rise of Extractive Logics | Saskia Sassen | 3/13/18

What makes a political theory a critical theory of politics? What critical theory of politics responds best to the particular challenges of our times? Drawing on a conception of critical theory indebted to the Frankfurt School tradition of theorizing, but integrating new impulses from outside it, I identify the salient features of a critical theory of politics. Using this general account as a frame, I propose a particular theory designed to fit contemporary democracies in which there is a plurality of values and corresponding modes of behaviour and practices. Non-authoritarian authority is at the centre of my critical theory of politics, partly because it is a key factor, determining how we think of important concerns such as human well-being, ecological sustainability and global justice, and partly because of the current global upsurge in democratic support for authoritarian political regimes. Authoritarian forms of power undermine individual freedom because they impose ways of thinking and acting on their subjects, bypassing their rational agency. By contrast, non- authoritarian, yet authoritative forms of power foster individual freedom by offering their subjects ethical orientation in their endeavours to lead lives for which they can take rational responsibility. Underlying my argument is a conceptualization of the idea of individual human freedom as a maturational process involving interactions between human subjects in relation to the validity of their particular ethical values. Its full development is shown to require non-authoritarian, yet authoritative social institutions.

Professor Maeve Cooke is Professor of Philosophy at UCD School of Philosophy and a member of the Royal Irish Academy, as well as a visiting scholar in the Program in Critical Theory for the 2017-2018 school year. Her books include Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics (MIT Press 1994) and Re-Presenting the Good Society (MIT Press 2006). She has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and edited collections and has delivered hundreds of papers to academic audiences throughout the world. Her work has been translated into German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Czech and Chinese. She is a regular contributor to public discussions in Ireland. She has held visiting appointments at leading universities in Germany and the USA and is the recipient of multiple prestigious research fellowships and awards. She sits on the editorial boards of a number of scholarly journals and is a co-director of the international colloquium “Philosophy and the Social Sciences,” which meets annually in Prague.

Non-authoritarian Authority: A Critical Theory of Politics for Our Times | Maeve Cooke | 4/16/18

In the second installment of our 5 Questions series, we asked recent Berkeley alum Jason Klocek how he came to his work on religion and what brought him to Berkeley. He describes his travels in Crete and Turkmenistan, and the direct experiences with religious diversity and conflict, as well as the intellectual questions that brought him to the PhD.

Jason Klocek is a Global Religion Research Initiative Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. More on Jason and his work is available at https://jasonklocek.weebly.com 

#ReligionInTheWorld

The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR) advances creative and critical scholarship on religion. bcsr.berkeley.edu | @ucbreligion

5 Questions Interview | A Winding Path to the PhD... | Jason Klocek | 9/10/18

This is the second of three UC Berkeley campus events with Verónica Gago. While on campus, she also participated in a conversation with Wendy Brown and hosted a seminar on the International Feminist Strikes of 2017 and 2018.

In Latin America, the meaning of neoliberalism remains contested, and debates on neoliberalism are ongoing. Complicating previous diagnoses, current feminist movements in the region have proposed new definitions grounded in concrete struggles. These have led to a rethinking of neoliberalism from below: an effort to rework the programs introduced by so-called “progressive” governments. The new definitions of neoliberalism have also spurred debates on the horizons of radical possibility open to an anti-neoliberalism produced in and through struggle.

Response by Leslie Salzinger, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley

Verónica Gago teaches Political Science at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and is Professor of Sociology at the Instituto de Altos Estudios, Universidad Nacional de San Martín. She is also Assistant Researcher at the National Council of Research (CONICET). Gago is the author of Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Tinta Limón 2014, Duke University Press, 2017) and of numerous articles published in journals and books throughout Latin America, Europe and the US. She is a member of the independent radical collective press Tinta Limón. She was part of the militant research experience Colectivo Situaciones, and she is now a member of Ni Una Menos.

Leslie Salzinger is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies. She got her PhD in Sociology at UC Berkeley and previously taught in the sociology departments at the University of Chicago and and Boston College. She is an ethnographer, focused on gender, feminist theory, economic sociology, and neoliberalism. Much of her research has focused on Latin America. Her primary theoretical interests lie in the cultural constitution of economic processes, and in the creation of subjectivities within political economies. Her award-winning first book, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories, analyzed the gendered dimensions of transnational production. Her current work in progress, Model Markets: Peso Dollar Exchange as a Site of Neoliberal Incorporation, analyzes peso/dollar exchange markets as crucial gendered and raced sites for Mexico’s shift from “developing nation” to “emerging market.” Her work on the role of masculinity in the evolution of contemporary global capitalism across sites from both projects is encapsulated in the 2016 essay “Re-Marking Men: Masculinity as a Terrain of the Neoliberal Economy.” In addition to the Sociology Department, Professor Salzinger is affiliated with Berkeley’s Program in Critical Theory.

Co-sponsored by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Anti-Neoliberal Feminism: A Reading From Within Present Struggles | Verónica Gago | 9/24/18

5 Questions Interview |  BCSR Co-Founders: Jonathan Sheehan and Mark Csikszentmihalyi | 11/27/18

For the past two years, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, has convened a series of workshops and seminars concerning, broadly speaking, the place of theology in the university. From the outset, our goal was to challenge narrow conceptions of both secular learning and “theology,” in hopes of fostering robust conversation about the teaching of religion in the pluralist setting of the modern university.

On February 22-23, 2019, we held the culminating conference for the project. Entitled “Theology and the Public University,” the conference assembled a group of talented and creative thinkers who we believe are pioneering new ways of imagining theology, broadly construed.

Three major inquiry-areas anchored the two-day conference:

Theology and the History of Learning: historical settings and genealogies of the interrelationship of theology and the modern landscape of university learning: the formation of seminaries, theology faculties in historical relationship to other university faculties, religion in public and private universities, comparative historical dimensions, legal and political contexts.

Theology and Modern Secular Disciplines: with particular focus on the modern research university, an investigation of the particularity of theological learning in relationship to contemporary university disciplines, including but not limited to religious studies; comparative work on the varieties of theological learning in universities/seminaries/divinity schools; connections and tensions between secular and theological modes of inquiry; specificity of the public university in these discussions

The Limits and Possibilities of Theology in a Pluralist World: exploring how theology translates, or does not translate, across religious worlds; alternative vocabularies for the religious imagination; relationships between theology and other forms of religious knowledge and experience; theology in and beyond a Christian setting; provincializing theology; theology and inter-religious debate; what would theology have to be, to be in a public university?

The Berkeley Public Theology Program invites innovative thinkers and public figures to Berkeley to reflect on the past, present, and future of theological inquiry. Such lectures spark scholarly conversations on campus and place Berkeley at the center of global conversations on religion and public life.

Theology and the Public University, Day 2 | Session 1: Viswanathan and Salvatore | 2/23/19

The Bible sometimes plays a major role in current, political discourses, especially in the United States. As a project, public theology supports efforts to let the Bible speak to contemporary, public concerns. But using the Bible in this way involves many potential traps. How can a 2000 year old book provide guidance for social and political challenges? Should it do so at all? This lecture argues that to use the Bible in social and political discourses without attending to its historical framework, and without dealing rationally and critically with its texts, will neither do a favor to theology nor to the public.

Konrad Schmid is Professor of Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism at the University of Zürich.

Critical Public Theology: How to Use and Not Use the Bible... | Konrad Schmid | 3/7/19

What's Theology Got to Do With It? An Eighteenth-Century Chinese Emperor Debating Religions and Christianity

In his Lettres chinoises, indiennes et tartares, Voltaire republished “a note by the good Kangxi Emperor to the Peking Jesuits” as follows: “The emperor is surprised to see you so stubborn in your ideas. Why would you worry so much about a world where you have not been yet? Enjoy the present. Your God must be pained by your preoccupations. Isn’t He powerful enough to exercise justice without your meddling?”  To Voltaire this was a proof of the superiority of Chinese wisdom over Christianity. This was, however, also a first intimation of the crumbling of imperial patronage towards the missionaries and their religious ideas.

By 1724, the Yongzheng Emperor, Kangxi’s son, further hardened the imperial stance. He issued a formal prohibition against Christian propagation in the provinces, eliciting, once again, Voltaire’s admiration. Nevertheless, Yongzheng officially retained the missionaries to serve in Beijing as scientific and artistic experts, and allowed them to keep the capital’s churches open. In part because his policy was ambiguously forbidding and allowing Christian activities in the same breath, foreign and Chinese underground priests secretly continued in their technically illegal undertakings in the provinces.

The simultaneous formal prohibition of Christianity and retention of the foreign priests at court stemmed from both pragmatic governance considerations and the pursuit of Yongzheng’s religious ideology of unification of the Three Teachings (Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism), ultimately a move towards the unification of all religions. Archival materials recording the proceedings of several audiences with the missionaries offer us glimpses of imperial personal views on religions and Christian theology in intimate settings, and uncover little known aspects of the emperor’s understanding of religion, and ultimately, of Chinese and European views of the divine.

Eugenio Menegon is Associate Professor of Chinese History at Boston University, and Collaborative Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College. He has published extensively on the history of Chinese-Western relations, and is the author of Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Harvard Asia Center and Harvard University Press, 2009), which was the recipient of the 2011 Levenson Prize in Chinese Studies (Association for Asian Studies). His current book project is an examination of the daily life and political networking of European residents at the Qing court in Beijing during the 17th-18th centuries.

The Berkeley Public Theology Program invites innovative thinkers and public figures to Berkeley to reflect on the past, present, and future of theological inquiry. Such lectures spark scholarly conversations on campus and place Berkeley at the center of global conversations on religion and public life.

What’s Theology Got to Do with It?... | Eugenio Menegon | 3/13/19

Haroon Mirza will examine how ideas seeded in the counterculture movement of the 1960s are now solidifying in contemporary culture and the influence that has had on his work. A London-based artist with a diverse multimedia practice, Mirza will touch on subjects that resonate with his broad interest in the creative history of the Bay Area including computing and AI, psychedelics research, pacifism, anti-capitalism, human rights, and spirituality.

Haroon Mirza has won international acclaim for installations that test the interplay and friction between sound and light waves and electric current. He devises kinetic sculptures, performances and immersive installations, such as The National Apavillion of Then and Now (2011) – an anechoic chamber with a circle of light that grows brighter in response to increasing drone, and completely dark when there is silence. An advocate of interference (in the sense of electro-acoustic or radio disruption), he creates situations that purposefully cross wires. He describes his role as a composer, manipulating electricity, a live, invisible and volatile phenomenon, to make it dance to a different tune and calling on instruments as varied as household electronics, vinyl and turntables, LEDs, furniture, video footage and existing artworks to behave differently. Processes are left exposed and sounds occupy space in an unruly way, testing codes of conduct and charging the atmosphere. Mirza asks us to reconsider the perceptual distinctions between noise, sound, and music and draws into question the categorization of cultural forms. “All music is organized sound or organized noise,” he says. “So as long as you’re organizing acoustic material, it’s just the perception and the context that defines it as music or noise or sound or just a nuisance” (2013).

Haroon Mirza was born in London, UK in 1977 where he lives and works. He has a BA in Painting from Winchester School of Art, an MA in Design Critical Practice and Theory from Goldsmiths College, London, UK (2006) and an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, UK (2007).

Co-sponsored by the Department of Art Practice Wiesenfeld Lecture Series, the Institute of South Asian Studies, and the Asian Art Museum.

The Berkeley Seminars in Art and Religion invite distinguished artists and scholars to share their creative and critical work on the connection between artistic expression and religious thought and practice with UC Berkeley students, faculty, and the wider Bay Area community.

The Creative Repercussions of Counterculture | Haroon Mirza | 4/3/19

Panelists from UC Berkeley, Laney College, and Cornell University will include Dan Blanton, Arturo Dávila Sánchez, Catherine Flynn, Robert Kaufman, Francine Masiello, Natalie Melas, Miryam Sas, and Nathaniel Wolfson.

This afternoon symposium and discussion—organized by UC Berkeley’s Program in Critical Theory—will feature two panels of literary and cultural critics who will reconsider surrealism: its histories, its afterlives, and its resonances in art and politics today. Participants will offer brief presentations that rethink the work of surrealist and surrealist-influenced art in Europe; in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Americas; and in North Africa. The symposium will also involve extensive discussion among the panelists and audience.

Presented by University of California, Berkeley’s Consortium on Surrealism @100 (organized by UC Berkeley’s Program in Critical Theory). This event is co-sponsored with City Lights Booksellers and Publishers and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

[Session 2] Surrealism Then, Now: Snapshots of Critically Engaged Art | Panel | 11/16/19

Etienne Balibar will reflect on his relationship to reading Marx, starting with Reading Capital, his early work co-written with Louis Althusser. He will seek to reconstruct his relation to Marx’s thought, communism, and engage the question of communism for the present and future.

Etienne Balibar teaches at Columbia every Fall semester. He is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Université de Paris X – Nanterre and Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He also holds a part-time Anniversary Chair in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. He has published widely in the areas of epistemology, Marxist philosophy, and moral and political philosophy in general. His works include Lire le Capital (with Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Jacques Rancière, Roger Establet) (1965); The Philosophy of Marx (1995); Spinoza and politics (1998); Politics and the Other Scene (2002); We, the People of Europe? (2003) ; Equaliberty (2014); Violence and Civility. On the Limits of Political Philosophy (2015); Citizen Subject. Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology (2017); Secularism and Cosmopolitanism (2018).

This event is co-sponsored by the Program in Critical Theory and the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Being Communist, Becoming Other | Etienne Balibar | 11/25/19

With Jan Joosten, Regius Professor of Hebrew, University of Oxford

At some time after the end of the First Temple period, the religion of ancient Israel became independent of the nation. Language and texts are key to this change. Hebrew turned into a sacred language, not one learned from one’s parents, but from the study of ancient texts. The process didn’t come to full fruition until after the fall of the Second Temple. But its earliest effects can be traced already in writings of the exilic period. This linguistic development is rooted in a profound change affecting Judean religion. Before the fall of Jerusalem, the cult of the God of Israel was part and parcel of a national existence with strong territorial and cultural components. In exile, worship of this same God was motivated differently, with the reference to ancient texts—history, law, and prophecy—taking on a new and ever-increasing role. The result was a new phenomenon in the ancient world.

Jan Joosten studied theology in Brussels and Princeton, and Semitic languages in Jerusalem. He earned a PhD in Semitic languages at the Hebrew University in 1989, a ThD at the Protestant Faculty in Brussels in 1994, and a HDR (Habilitation à diriger des recherches) in Strasbourg in 1994. He taught at the Faculty of Protestant Theology of the University of Strasbourg for twenty years. In 2014 he was appointed Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Oxford, and Student of Christ Church. He is Editor-in-chief of Vetus Testamentum since 2010, president of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies since 2012, and honorary member of the Academy of Hebrew Language.

Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies, UC Berkeley Near Eastern Studies, and the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.

The Invention of Religion: Jews in Babylon... | Jan Joosten | 11/19/19

The Program in Critical Theory & City Lights Books, San Francisco, present a talk by Howard Eiland, “Hamlet as Trauerspiel?”

Origin of the German Trauerspiel was Walter Benjamin’s first full, historically-oriented analysis of modernity. Readers of English knew it until last year under the title The Origin of German Tragic Drama, but in fact the subject is something else: the play of mourning. Howard Eiland’s completely new English translation and introduction (Harvard University Press, 2019), the first to appear since 1977, is closer to the German text and more consistent with Benjamin’s philosophical idiom.

Focusing on the extravagant and historical seventeenth-century theatrical genre of the trauerspiel, precursor of the opera, Benjamin identifies allegory as the constitutive trope of the Baroque and of modernity itself. Allegorical perception bespeaks a world of mutability and equivocation, a melancholy sense of eternal transience without access to the transcendentals of the medieval mystery plays—though no less haunted and bedeviled, and no less susceptible to momentary apotheosis. History as trauerspiel—as shaped by the base machination of schemers—is in Benjamin’s account the condition as well as subject of modern allegory in its inscription of the abyssal, or ever-increasing, apparently incomprehensible, layers of depth, experience, and interpretive questions.

Benjamin’s investigation of the trauerspiel includes German texts and late Renaissance European drama such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Calderón’s Life Is a Dream. The book’s Prologue is one of Benjamin’s most important and difficult pieces of writing. It sets forth his method of indirection and his idea of the “constellation” (which would become crucial to thinkers across several generations of the Frankfurt School, as well to other critics, philosophers, theorists, and artists) as a key means of grasping the world, of constructing dynamic unities from the myriad bits of daily life and historical materials. Thoroughly annotated with a philological and historical introduction and other explanatory and supplementary material, Eilan’s rigorous and elegant new translation brings fresh understanding to a cardinal work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest literary critics.

Eiland’s talk “Hamlet as Trauerspiel?” approaches Benjamin’s interpretation of Hamlet—which deems the play a consummate trauerspiel—as a way into the thorny interior of the trauerspiel book itself.  Benjamin presents the theory of the trauerspiel as containing  “prolegomena” to the interpretation of Shakespearean “tragedy” (Benjamin faults critics for their “loose usage” of the term “tragedy”), and to the interpretation of Hamlet in particular. Eiland examines Benjamin’s claims for decisive historical and formal-stylistic differences between the genres of tragedy and trauerspiel—the former based in pagan myth and cult, the latter in Judeo-Christian history and spectacle; the former embedded in dialogue, the latter in the Dingwelt—and Eiland then briefly traces these distinctions back through the German critical-philological tradition, to Herder and A.W. Schlegel. Eiland focuses, first, on the philosophical-historical “antinomies of allegoresis” that structure the trauerspiel world, and then on Benjamin’s discussion of the enigmatic themes of “fate” and “play.” These issues are all reflected and crystallized in Hamlet‘s death scene, which Benjamin here presents—in its “vehement externality,” its crucial reliance on props and its profusion of corpses, as well as in its hint of apotheosis—as typical of the trauerspiel. All of which leads Benjamin to conclude that Hamlet’s death is definitely not tragic. Eiland takes issue with this last assessment, arguing for the prince as a tragic hero of recognition and remembrance.

Walter Benjamin on William Shakespeare: "Hamlet as Trauerspiel?" | Howard Eiland | 2/10/20

The Program in Critical Theory & City Lights Books, San Francisco, present a panel-and-audience discussion with Howard Eiland: “On Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel.”

A panel of UC Berkeley faculty including Catherine Flynn (English; Irish Studies; Critical Theory), Niklaus Largier (German; Comparative Literature; Critical Theory), and Jeffrey Knapp (English; Film and Media) will speak with Eiland about Benjamin’s book, including issues involving Eiland’s new translation of and introduction to the text, as well as those raised by Eiland’s Monday, February 10 talk, “Hamlet as Trauerspiel?”. The panel will then open things up by inviting questions and discussion from the audience.

Howard Eiland taught literature for several decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is co-editor, translator, and author in the ongoing Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings series from Harvard University Press.  The many volumes in the series that he’s translated, edited, and/or co-authored include The Arcades Project (2002); Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (2014); and, most recently, the new translation of and introduction to Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel (2019).

On Walter Benjamin's Origin of the German Trauerspiel | Howard Eiland | 2/11/20

The Program in Critical Theory & City Lights Books, SF, Present a Seminar/Discussion with Howard Eiland on his recently published book: Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019).

Howard Eiland’s Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) is a highly erudite and courageous inquiry into the arts. Weaving through a host of “classic” texts—literary, cinematic, and musical—these notes of a virtouso close reader set up echoes and reflections across signature moments. These “notes” address a dissident force in art while discussing an impressively diverse range of works and ideas in literature, film, and jazz. For instance: Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Jane Austen mix with Dickens and Kafka; Carl Dreyer intersects with Mizoguchi, Bresson, Lynch, and Madden; Eric Dolphy and Cecil Taylor process Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. In a quasi-musical way, Notes interweaves elements within and between works—elements that open onto the unknown in an utterly questioning and self-questioning way. Eiland’s eloquent writing itself exemplifies this “aesthetic,” if it may be called that; the writing is enthralling in its capacity to challenge both the works examined and those who would assess them. Notes focuses on those energies in art that enact image spaces and spatiotemporal alterations in which life is never quite what it seems to be. This extraordinarily original book will interest all concerned with broad implications of developments in literature, film, and jazz.

Eiland will be joined in conversation by two jazz pianists and UC Berkeley literary critics: Michael Lucey (French; Comparative Literature; Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality; Program in Critical Theory) and Maya Kronfeld (Comparative Literature).

Eiland will read briefly from and discuss the book. For those wishing to attend the seminar/discussion, please email critical_theory@berkeley.edu to receive excerpts from the book.

Howard Eiland taught literature for several decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is co-editor, translator, and author in the ongoing Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings series from Harvard University Press. The many volumes in the series that he’s translated, edited, and/or co-authored include The Arcades Project (2002); Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (2014); and, most recently, the new translation of and introduction to Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel (2019). Eiland has also worked for decades as a critic writing on literature, film, and jazz; Notes contains a sampling from among the most acute of these critical pieces.

This event is co-sponsored by the Program in Critical Theory and City Lights Booksellers and Publishers.

Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz | Howard Eiland | 2/12/20

The Christian campaign against secular Communism was a defining phenomenon in Europe’s modern history. Over the last few years, scholars have begun to uncover its many roots—especially in anti-Semitism—and to chart the vast intellectual production and political mobilization it inspired. This talk will add to this burgeoning work by exploring the role of Protestant anti-Catholic polemics in shaping anti-secularism. I will show how crucial anti-Catholic tropes from the late nineteenth century, according to which Catholicism denied free will and enslaved individuals psychologically, resurfaced as a crucial anti-Communist trope in the twentieth century. By tracing this genealogy, I will investigate how intra-religious concepts were utilized to explain allegedly secular movements.

Udi Greeberg is an associate professor of European history at Dartmouth College. He is the author of the prize-winning The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2015), as well as many articles on European thought and politics. He has also written for The New Republic, The Nation, Dissent, Boston Review, and other publications.

The Anti-Catholic Origins of Anti-Communism | Udi Greenberg | 2/25/20

The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) was established in 2013 by UC Berkeley’s College of Letters and Sciences: Division of Arts and Humanities with a mission to support the programming and development of several dynamic interdisciplinary research units in the humanities and social sciences.

Currently CICI serves The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, The Program in Critical Theory, and the Digital Humanities at Berkeley, three programs led by a highly diverse community of 200 faculty, advisors, scholars and graduate students from nearly 30 campus departments and schools.

The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry

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