Academic Year 2026-27

HUM 260ABC: Critical Theory Workshop - Theories of Projection

Instructor: Rei, Terada
Mondays, 5-8pm (TBD on specfic meeting dates)
In contemporary critical discourse, “projection,” unlike for example “disavowal,” functions
more as an ordinary language notion than a psychoanalytic term of art: it means attributing one’s
feelings to someone nearby, and we shouldn’t do it. This workshop will recover its complex
itinerary, its proximity to hallucination and dreaming, and, more important, its underused
capacities as a critical lens.
In its intellectual history, projection marks the moment when Freud’s economic idea of
displacement—a feeling takes a path of least resistance from a difficult site to an easier one—
swerves into Melanie Klein’s interpersonal theory of human development. For Klein, a legacy of
“projective identification” between mother and infant informs productive and coercive emotive
exchanges in adult life. From here on, fantasy is co-involved with power. Lacan’s criticism and
translation of Klein into negative and linguistic terms then generates his subordination of the
imaginary and his interest in inverted messages. Analytic wildman and maybe-visionary theorist
W.R. Bion develops an alternative metapsychology based on the ability or not of the mind to
transform turmoil through a play of containers and contents: the norm is projection and
hallucination, and the alternative is 24/7 “dreaming” as a model for thought. Clinical
psychoanalysis is still developing a tension between projection as an inevitable entanglement of
beings—in which it’s often the body that is unconscious and unknowable—and projection as the
active ingredient of language, arising because beings do not meet.
As interesting as projection’s journey is, the goal of the workshop is to avoid becoming
intellectual history at any cost. Rather, the dynamics that projection brings up suggest questions
and routes for future cultural analysis. Projection is not only a transfer from a hard to an easy site
—which is itself an interesting storage strategy—but a divergent process of alliance, enmity, and
transformation (of what, and how?); or a fantasmatic violence that is not a mere mistake but a
symptom within psychoanalysis itself; or a model of language, demonstrating how it is possible
to put a non-empirical object in a fictive container like an “image” or a “word,” change the “I”
that is holding it, and move it somewhere, for worse and better. In the workshop, we read mostly
clinical psychoanalytic literature that helps to give a feel for projection’s variability. Each
participant is invited to perceive and work with projection in their own writing’s materials in a
way that truly analyzes its instances and exposes the underlying rival theories of language and
social violence to which it is connected. (Texts from Freud, Klein, Lacan, Winnicott, Bion,
Isaacs, Searles, Ferro, Stern, Lombardi, De Masi; films TBA)
 
 

Fall 2026

HUM 270: Cognitive Mapping in Minds, Machines, and Metaphors (COGS 229)
Instructor: Aaron Bornstein
T/TH 2-3:20pm
The cognitive revolution began with the observation that rodents could form mental "maps" useful for guiding navigation, planning, and memory. These findings portended the fall of behaviorism and the rise of a new scientific paradigm that centered these internal worlds. Shortly after, urban theorist Kevin Lynch introduced the term "cognitive mapping" to describe the distinct internal representations of shared city space that divide inhabitants and define the overlapping, but independent, extent of their experiences. This was taken up by many thinkers including, most famously, Frederic Jameson, to theorize the way in which built, cultural, and social environments propagate through the structures formed in individual minds. In parallel, the neurobiological study of cognitive maps continued in rodents and, later, humans, identifying key cell types that represent physical as well as non-spatial associations and the latent structure of our experiences. More recently, computer science has contributed rigorous quantitative theory to explain the various manifestations of cognitive maps in the brain, propelling advances in neurobiology and also artificial intelligence.

These two lines of inquiry — cognitive mapping in critical theory and cognitive maps in the brain sciences — have continued largely independently, in parallel, for decades, making complementary and concordant discoveries. In this cross-disciplinary class, students from many departments we will gain a rigorous understanding of the foundations in each field, while examining how to put these works into productive conversation, and reveal areas where each discipline might make meaningful contribution to the gaps in theory raised by the other. We will see how the humanistic disciplines have, in some ways, more faithfully represented Tolman’s stated intentions for the study of cognitive maps in rodents, and also ask how recent advances in quantitative theory of cognitive maps may have implications for the further development of cognitive mapping. We will engage with works by psychologists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, urban theorists, critical geographers, and literary and art critics. Guest speakers will provide in-depth analysis of the various manifestations of cognitive maps in their disciplines. Assignments will include options for programming simulations or writing short critical essays.

 

HUM 270: Debates on Critcal Theory (DRAMA 292)
Instructor:Bryan Reynolds
Th 9-11:50am

Many of the most important developments in the recent history of critical theory and 20th-Century literary theory were defined and facilitated by debates between different schools of thought. This course is an exploration into the main theoretical and methodological differences at the heart of debates between critical theorists influenced by, on the one hand, Marxism and poststructuralism, and, on the other, psychoanalysis and structuralism. Our focus, however, will be on theorists who move interdisciplinarily and transversally – fugitively disrupting and pushing beyond established paradigms – through the debates to achieve groundbreaking impact on the future of critical inquiry. With a sub-emphasis on theories of desire and subjectivity to further narrow the field for the course, we will study works by Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Kate Millet, Helene Cixous, Angela Davis, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Audre Lorde, Alice Jardine, and Avital Ronell.

 

Winter 2027

HUM 270: History of Computing (FMS 291)
Instructor: Peter Krapp

One aim of a history of computing is to explore how the computer becomes a meta-medium.Instead of enumerating the conceptual inventory of digital culture (from analog and early digital machines to mainframes
and from minicomputers and microcomputers to the creation of decentralized networks), this course asks how the world got into the computer: what are the theoretical dimensions of our digital era? This course
traces neither a history of the industry, nor a history of calculating devices, but follows the contours of debating the history of computing.

 

HUM 270: Microbial Media (EAS 220)
Instructor: Jon Pitt

This seminar focuses on microbes as a critical means of destabilizing anthropocentric binaries such as life/death, self/other, and male/female. Building from Heather Paxson’s figuration of “microbiopolitics,” which “concerns the recognition and management, governmental and grassroots, of human encounters with the vital organismic agencies of bacteria, viruses, and fungi,” we will read works in the growing corpus of “Composting Feminisms” (as coined by Jennifer Mae Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis) and theories of more-than-human care that extend to the microbial world (including the work of María Puig de la Bellacasa and Kristina M. Lyons). These works will inform our engagement with primary media texts (literature, film, and manga) from Japan that concern the human-microbe relationship through composting and fermentation. We will examine these interactive practices as a means of anti-Capitalist praxis. No Japanese language skills are required.

 

HUM 270: What Remains? Language Remains: A Seminar on Hannah Arendt (ART 215)
Instructor: Juli Carson

"We will focus on Hannah Arendt’s corpus of writing as it  relates to (and is refashioned by) contemporary art and visual 
culture. Thorough explications will be made of primary texts. In this context, case study artworks and secondary theories 
will then be addressed, ones in which the artist or writer at hand  knowingly takes up and addresses the theory we have explicated.  
As such, there is a dual ""author-function"" to this seminar.  First, we return to Arendt’s school of thought, through which a unique 
concept of Modernity was formulated that entailed related theories of action, judgment and citizenship. Secondly, we will consider how 
these theories have resurfaced (as an operation) in the hands of contemporary practitioners (from critics, scholars, artists, and curators). 
We will therefore also consider Arendt’s formulations as they intersect with those made by Jacques Derrida, Helene Cixous, Giorgio Agamben 
and Jean Francois Lyotard. The criterion for selecting Arendt as a subject of study is based upon my observation that a significant group 
of artists are similarly engaging her writings as a ""medium"" of cultural critique. "

 

Spring 2027

HUM 270: Plasticity and Form (CL 210)
Instructor: Catherine Malabou

A contemporary approach to Hegel's Aesthetics
Abstract: Linking aesthetics, thought, and the nervous system, the course aims to question how a new concept of form is emerging today. This reflection is part of a political, philosophical, and artistic paradigm shift, from the paradigm of inscription to the paradigm of plasticity. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, form was decried for its systematicity (Derrida), its normativity (Deleuze), its sovereignty (Agamben), and was supplanted by the notion of TRACE. The notion of trace has been prevalent in all areas of culture. It has supported the vision of the unconscious, the formless, the rhizome, writing, dissemination, and the theory of micro-powers. This prevalence has been accompanied by a farewell to Hegel and his system and the rejection of any biological or neurological approach to the psyche. But have we really understood what Hegel means by form? Through the study of the three terms Figur (art and aesthetics), Gestalt (phenomenology), and Form (logic) in Hegelian thought, we will sketch out a path that will lead us through the new labyrinths of memory, from the pyramids to the synapses, and question the understanding of form as incarnation. In conclusion, we will ask ourselves what the political value of “prefiguration” is.

 

HUM 270: Critical Theory from Subaltern Studies to Indigenous Methodologies 
Instructor: Mark LeVine

As the name suggests, during this course we will cover a lot of ground in 10 weeks, beginning with the rise of Subaltern Studies, continuing to postcolonial theory, then to Latin American postcolonial studies and Decolonial Theory, and finally, Indigenous theories and methodologies. All of this will be through the overall framework of Critical Theory as it was developed by the Frankfurt School and, at the same time but from a unique perspective, the work of Gramsci.

 

HUM 270: Gender and Care Ethics (EAS 220/GS)
Instructor: Ying Yu

This seminar is structured around several intellectual debates. Starting with Carol Gillian’s pioneering research into the moral orientations of women, we explore how her formulation of the “ethic of care” diverges from traditional moral theory and liberal individualism, but also appears to be closely associated with women’s traditional role as nurturer. We then proceed to examine models of the self in terms of individual autonomy and relational subjectivity, the tension between the feminist demand for individual autonomy and the ethical dimensions of intersubjectivity, and the debate surrounding how to interpret pre-modern and non-Western understanding of care.

 

HUM 270: Assemblages (VS 295)
Instructor: Matthew Canepa

This seminar approaches an archive of theoretical work on assemblages including Deleuze and Guattari, Jane Bennett, and Manuel DeLanda and puts it into dialogue with contemporary archaeological theory to understand the intersection between objects, space and practice. It is designed to provide students a grounding in key critical theoretical texts dealing with assemblages, objecthood, space/place and practice theory and invites them to understand the social, somatic, political and environmental impact and underpinnings of these entanglements. It allows for students whose projects focus on both the small (precious or everyday objects, clothing, tools etc.) and the large (structures, cityscapes, vast cultural landscapes etc.) and the hope is that students will put these texts into dialogue with their own work. With regards to CTE, it offers students who have worked primarily discursively an opportunity to gain methodologies and experience with materiality, landscape, environments and visual culture. Assemblage thought is not a unified body of work, but might itself be considered an assemblage of ideas, concepts and methods, some of which can be put to work in the addressing of particular archaeological (in all senses) questions.
 

 

HUM 270: Critical Theory in the Asian Century (EAS)
Instructor: Rey Chow

How would juxtaposing critical theory and what has been called the Asian century energize intellectual inquiry in the humanities? Can critical theory be rethought, not merely in abstract, conceptual registers but also as part of a larger epistemological threshold involving the emergence and transformation of “Asia” into a force with which the world cannot not contend?

With reference to a number of critical theorists who have published extensively on East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, this seminar explores the sediments, practices, and potentialities of critical theory at a time when connotations of “Asia,” instead of being a mere afterthought, are galvanizing thought, imagination, and different forms of agency. Topics to be discussed will be drawn from critical debates in contemporary philosophy, Asian studies, film and media studies, globalized mass culture, affect-related discourse, and more.