Academic Year 2025-26
HUM 260ABC: Critical Theory Workshop - "Race, Religions, and Psychoanalysis"
Professor J. Kameron Carter
1:00-3:30pm on Select Meeting Dates Listed Below
This yearlong Critical Theory Workshop explores psychoanalysis as a means of interrogating issues of race and religion. We will establish a foundation in psychoanalytic theory through readings from Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Specifically, we will analyze Freud and Lacan to uncover how themes of religion and race are repressed within psychoanalytic theory. We will then consider recent work that explicitly addresses race and religion as significant dimensions of psychoanalysis. Finally, we will conclude the workshop with a reading of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, which provides a literary site for examining the intersections of race, religion, and psychoanalysis in the context of settler colonialism, political theology, and environmental catastrophe.
Meeting Dates:
Fall -- October 14, 2025 & November 18, 2025
Winter-- January 6, 2026, January 10, 2026, February 3, 2026, & February 17, 2026
Spring-- April 14, 2026, April 28, 2026, May 12, 2026, & May 26, 2026
Fall 2025
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HUM 270/ENTL ST 204: Theories of Globalization Tu, 2:00pm-4:50pm **While the course could not be formally cross-listed as HUM270, CTE students may take this course for credit (as though it were a 270) by requesting an exception from the Director (criticaltheory@uci.edu). Mention the word globalization today and you might get a response that sounds something like: “aren’t we over all that?” While earlier debates questioned whether the term was a sanitized euphemism for long-standing processes of imperialism in the world-system, today people are likely to believe that the proliferation of tariffs, border walls, and nationalist revanchism has made the notion of a transnational and interconnected world passé. And yet, our lives remain fundamentally interconnected across space and time, and capitalism still requires a world market that transcends the sovereignty of nation-states. How to make sense of this apparent disjuncture over the relevance of globalization amid a rapidly changing world order? And what are some of the emerging ramifications of the material shift from a Western-centered form of globalization to a decentered, multipolar, or Eastern-centered world? This course will explore some of the original debates around processes of globalization before quickly turning to more recent interventions examining how “the annihilation of space by time” is also defined by uneven and heterogeneous relations to labor and movement, and by the ever-present threat of violence and war. Throughout these debates, we will explore questions of political economy and culture alongside renewed forms of internationalism from below. Readings may include work by: David Harvey, Lisa Lowe, Jasper Bernes, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Giovanni Arrighi, Laleh Khalili, Achille Mbembe, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Neferti Tadiar.
HUM 270/VS 295: Transculturation, Entanglement and Assemblages This seminar will provide a platform for participants to evaluate critical perspectives drawn from a wide variety of interdisciplinary conversations on the problem of what constitutes, maintains and transforms (practical, intellectual, expressive, material, visual) cultures on the micro and macros scale. Moreover, it offers a framework for studying cross-cultural interaction that integrates practical, cognitive, art historical and new-material approaches as well as perspectives from both the contemporary and premodern world. Starting from a post-structuralist standpoint and moving to new perspectives as diverse as assemblage theory and the new materialisms, it will introduce key theorists who provide traction in defining and analyzing culture and potential ways forward. We will consider the problem not only from discursive and economic standpoints, as has been common in the humanities, but from environmental, material, urban, visual and somatic perspectives. Thus, while we address some of the most commonly considered problems, such as colonial and post-colonial situations, this seminar attempts to deepen, nuance and broaden these perspectives and provide participants with a wider theoretical and analytical toolkit. Problems include the role of the visual, material and spatial in the extended mind/cognition, inculcation of- or resistances to- ideological formulations in human experience, and the creation, maintenance and manipulation of memory (personal and collective); cognitive artifacts, hybrid minds and human (practical, visual and material) cultural evolutions; art, ritual, religious experience and embodied simulations; the visuality of violence; social cognition and collective memory; phenomenologies of natural, urban and architectonic space and place; and cross-cultural ecological, social, material and visual entanglements.
HUM 270/Informatics 261: Social Analysis of Computing For over twenty years, UC Irvine’s Department of Informatics has been associated with research that has something to do with the social, including foundational work such as Rob Kling’s articulation of social informatics. In venues as disparate as the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI); scholarly journals in science and technology studies, sociology, history, communication, and anthropology; and academic and popular books, a general interest in the social has come to mark many forms of research on computing, computational media, and computer-related phenomena. In this class, we are going to try to re-create some of the reasoning that sought to insert (or perhaps re-insert) consideration of the social into research on computing technology. If we accept that the study of computing requires an interest in people, what kinds of theories and tools for the study of humans must we consider? Put another way, how might the study of other social phenomena such as social history, social theory, or social epistemology shape the study of technology?
HUM 270/ ETC 200B: Catastrophic Imaginations Revisited The capacity to imagine the future as catastrophe is a central trait of modernity and a vital task of world risk society. Rather than considering the future as the telos of an eschatological history or the space in which history moves progressively forward, the future as catastrophe became with the European enlightenment a medium of self-reflection to continually illuminate the limits, flaws, and risks of its unfolding present. From Kant to Adorno, Arendt, and Derrida as well as from Voltaire to Sebald and current discourses on genocide and extinction, catastrophic imagination in literature and art is tasked to give shape to catastrophes that transform contemporary societies before they (fully) disrupt if not end the modern world itself. What does this task teach us about the capacities and limits of catastrophic imagination in cultural theory and in fiction? European literature and theory, with its transformations and metamorphoses of apocalyptic imagination, dialectic of enlightenment, and risk theory will provide our course with the necessary materials for a reassessment of the function and the limits of a catastrophic imagination.
HUM 270/ENG 210: The Poetics of Slavery The course will explore the ways in which the expansion of Atlantic enslavement informed what we have come to call Romantic poetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of the examples will be Anglo-American, and will include Clarkson, Hegel, Wheatley, Horton, Blake, Shelley, Bryant, Mill, Douglass, Harper, Whitfield, and Du Bois. There is also a chance that this will just become a seminar on Wheatley (Peters). Theoretical readings will include Hartman, Moten, Sharpe, Berlant, Wynter, Terada, Hanson, Abrams, Brady, Nersessian, and others.
HUM 270/EAS 220: Karatani & Friends In 2022 Karatani Kōjin won the “Nobel Prize in Philosophy,” the Berggruen Prize. He is the most important philosopher in modern Japan. He is also one of the most insightful readers of modern Japanese literature. This seminar examines his essays on literature in tandem with the works they discuss, by “friends” ranging from Soseki, Akutagawa, Oe and Tsushima to Freud, Marx, and Foucault. We ask three core questions. First, how did Karatani convince the Japanese public, in a series of essays for a monthly literary journal in 1974, that the key to understanding Capital Volume I is reading Saussure? Students who do not have a background in post-structuralism will learn the basics from Karatani’s lucid prose. Second, how did Karatani turn a year as a visiting professor with Frederic Jameson and Paul de Man at Yale in 1975 into Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1980), the most insightful book ever written on “interiority” “landscape” and “creativity” in the modern canon? Third, how should we understand Karatani’s insistence, in books like History and Repetition (2004) that a semiotic “aporia” or “gap” is our only reliable deterrent to fascism? Throughout, we consider Karatani’s expressed disinterest in feminism and the environment, and what it says in broad strokes about the compatibility of post-structuralism and environmental humanities.
HUM 270/SPN 239: The Graphic Novel This graduate seminar introduces students to critical phenomenology through discussions in comics studies. The aesthetic and critical theories in comics studies that are most innovative and experimental are often written in the idiom of comics, and this seminar will also discuss how to read such graphic critical theory. Each week, students will read one graphic novel paired with one or two theoretical texts to examine and interrogate how the experience of reading comics is constructed on the pages of a graphic novel. Theoretical texts will include authors in the fields of aesthetics and phenomenology, such as Artistotles, Edgar Allan Poe, John Dewey, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Mearleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Fred Moten, and Gayle Salamon as well as comics studies scholars and creators, such as Elizabeth El Refaie, Jennifer Howell, Kelcey Ervick, Tom Hart, Scott McCloud, and Lynda Barry. |
Winter 2026
HUM 270/ART 215: Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XI
Professor Juli C Carson
This course will engage in a close reading of Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XI. The transcribed seminar, known in its book form as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, was a primary text through which a post-structuralist theory of the subject was introduced into post-modern art production in the 70s (Britain) and 80s (America. In a 21st century context, this same text was returned to and re-historicized by the psychoanalytic group known as “The Lacanian Link,” a consortium of theorists including Joan Copjec, Bruce Fink, and Slavoj Zizek, all of whom are influenced by Jacques-Alain Miller’s reading of Seminar XI against the British and American models. This Millerian school has gone on to influence the theoretical texts of Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere among others. In this course the student will study Lacan’s primary text in tandem with a consideration of the work’s secondary reception and critical application within the fields of visual art and cultural theory, from the 1970s to the present.
HUM 270/EAS 220: Microbial Media
Professor Jon L 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/CL 210: Thinking with Water (Or the Politics & Poetics of Water)
Professor Adriana Johnson
The seminar is a critical introduction into some of the discourses and debates around the Blue Humanities, also variously known as Blue Cultural Studies, Oceanic Studies, Hydrocriticism, Hydro-Colonialism, Thalassography, Wet Globalization, Wet Ontologies, or Hydrohumanities. While these fields of thinking overlap with ecocriticism or the environmental humanities, they have also emerged in counterpoint to them, proposing ways of moving beyond earth-centered approaches to our surroundings.
Three central questions will guide our inquiry. First, how do different forms or bodies of water matter and inform these discourses? Or what changes depending on which waters we’re starting from? Ocean spaces (which as Christopher Connery has said, is capital’s “myth element”) has driven much of the theorizations of the Blue Humanities, but different lines of thinking have emerged from confronting rivers, estuaries and, to a much lesser extent, rain.
Second, how do theoretical discourses and/or the questions being asked rest on particular archives, geographic locales or historical anchoring points? Early iterations of the Blue Humanities were both Atlantic-centric as well as dominated by Anglophone literary criticism and histories; although there has since been a shift to global, non-Western, and indigenous materials some archives are still missing in the discussions. Questions around rivers are often articulated with indigenous struggles while ocean spaces are variously linked to capital and the slave ship. How might we think critically about such archival distributions?
Third and finally, what does it mean to think and read for water in literature, photography, film, or art?
Readings will include selections from Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, Melody Jue’s Wild Blue Media, Jamie Linton’s What is Water?, Ceclia Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis’ Thinking with Water, Deborah Cowen’s The Deadly Life of Logistics, Nicole Starosielski’s The Undersea Network, Alexis Wick’s The Red Sea: In Search of Lost Space, Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea, Dilip da Cunha’s The Invention of Rivers and others. Films will likely include Alan Sekula’s The Forgotten Space, Patricio Guzman’s The Pearl Button, Everlane Moraes’ Pattaki.
HUM 270/Drama 292: Poststructuralism
Professor Bryan Randolph Reynolds
Beginning with a quick overview of structuralist thought (Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes), this course is an intense introduction into the work of poststructuralism’s most influential proponents, including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hélène Cixous, Gille Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. Emphasis will be put on the applications of poststructuralist theory for studies of subjectivity, social identity, cultural difference, and societal structures, and how poststructuralism can serve political activism.
HUM270/CRM/LAW 275: What is Civil Disobedience?
Professor Eraldo Souza dos Santos
Over the last half-century, civil disobedience has become a key political concept around the world. The meaning of the phrase, however, has been contested on more than one occasion—from discussions on the radicalism of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and Extinction Rebellion to controversy over the legitimacy of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing and recent debates about the appropriation of the concept by far-right movements. But what does “civil disobedience” mean? Is it compatible with the rule of law and democratic principles? Does it represent a danger to state authority? What are the differences, if any, between civil disobedience and crime, resistance, and revolution? Can civil disobedience be a right and a duty?
Drawing on both published materials and archival sources from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, we will reconstruct in this seminar the global history of civil disobedience in order to answer these questions. We will begin with the origins of the phrase in American abolitionist circles in the mid-nineteenth century before tracing its circulation in the British Empire and its eventual appropriation by activists, lawyers, and philosophers around the world from the 1960s to the present day. We will read and discuss the work of political thinkers such as Plato, Thomas Hobbes, Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi, Kwane Nkrumah, Pauli Murray, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Rawls, Hannah Arendt, Valerie Solanas, and Angela Davis. In analyzing historical sources (films, newspaper articles, leaflets, photographs, songs, legal documents, etc.), we will explore methodological and theoretical questions in the fields of intellectual history and the history of political thought, political and social theory, critical philosophy of race, and social movement studies.
Spring 2026
HUM 270: Multispecies Knowing
Professor Brianne Donaldson
Multispecies perspectives can challenge and expand long-standing questions in Western philosophy: Who or what counts as a knower? What kinds of knowing are valid? Is knowledge a product of mind, body, or something else? Historically, these epistemic questions have been answered in ways that neutralize the knowing and knowledge contribution of and for more-than-human beings, as well as those on the margins of society considered less than “human.” Consequently, these assumptions often support the destruction of ecological habitats, industrialization of food animals, widespread use of insect and plant toxins, water and air pollution, climate extinctions, ecological militarism, and the perpetual flow of living beings used for entertainment, research, clothing, companionship, and economic resources. We will engage cross-cultural and multidisciplinary perspectives (including Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Christian, Muslim, African, Daoist, LatinX, Animist, Kabbalistic, Indigenous, among others) as well as philosophies of plant and insect life, race and disability studies, laboratory epistemology, embodied semiotics, and scholar-artists—toward new modes of responsiveness alongside the existent entities who co-constitute our entangled planetary existence.
HUM 270/COMP LIT 210: Playing and Reality
Professor Herschel Farbman
This course will be devoted to an immersive of reading of the papers collected in D.W. Winnicott’s Playing and Reality, along with key intertexts by Freud and Klein, and Deleuze and Guattari’s objections. Paraphrases of Winnicott’s claims—for example, on play and boundaries, on “transitional objects,” on the “good enough mother,” and on depression in relation to personal integration—circulate widely in discussions across the humanities. The aim of this course is to facilitate first-hand exploration of some of the key texts from which these claims emerge. We will follow closely Winnicott’s way of working in writing, paying special attention to the difficulties he encounters and the ways he does and doesn’t address them. One aim of the course is to open a psychoanalytic angle on the fascism involved in the drawing and policing of the borders of play at the present moment—to get a handle on the fascism of the present moment this way.
HUM 270/HIS: Critical Theory: From Subaltern Studies to Indigenous Methodolgies
Professor 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/SPAN 269: The Logical Cultures of Neoliberalism
Professor Horacio Legras
Neoliberalism is both a political and an economic project. As such, it may represent the most ambitious and encompassing attempt to modify human nature—an endeavor that Alain Badiou identifies as the culmination of the project of modernity in The Century.
In this course, we will trace the development of neoliberalism from its programmatic origins (Hayek, von Mises, Röpke, Rougier) and its earliest critiques (Foucault). We will then examine contributions that emerged following the consolidation of neoliberalism in the 1990s, including works by Wendy Brown, Nigel Thrift, Nancy Fraser, David Harvey, and Mark Fisher.
In the final part of the course, we will explore perspectives on neoliberalism that build on Jacques Lacan’s observations about a “society of enjoyment”—particularly his 1972 formulation of the discourse of the capitalist. We will consider its reworkings by Lacanian scholars such as Slavoj Žižek, Colette Soler, and Todd McGowan.
HUM 270/COMP LIT: TBD
Professor Catherine Malibou
HUM 270/POLSCI 239: African American Political Thought
Professor Keith Topper
Reflection on the history and experience of African Americans has inspired some of the most trenchant and imaginative work of critical social and political theory today. In this course, we will explore a few of the most challenging and compelling contributions to this remarkable body of thought. Starting with an examination of three of the most important contributors to African American political thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois and James Baldwin), this course will proceed to investigate how a range of contemporary thinkers both extend and challenge these earlier ideas, while also responding in original ways to distinctive crises of the current age. Although this course does not aim to provide a comprehensive survey of African American political thought in the past or present--a goal that would be unattainable in this or any other one quarter course--it does offer a sample of the diversity and vitality of this tradition of critical thought, drawing on work across multiple disciplines: political theory, philosophy, black studies, anthropology, sociology, legal studies, fiction, and more. Notably, the course explores enduring themes--for example, rejection of myth of sovereignty and exploration of ideas of nonsovereign freedom--and engages some of the diverse ways in which contributors to this tradition have articulated their reflections on central issues of African American politics and culture, working through multiple genres of writing, from familiar forms of critical theory to autobiography, literary nonfiction, epistolary writing, and much more.
HUM 270/ANTHRO 264: Method and Allegory
Professor Antonio Tomas
It has been demonstrated by Hayden White and others that there is a close relationship between modes of emplotment and the production of historical truth. Or, to put it differently, the form of the content presented is as important as the content itself. As such, this course proposes to look beyond debates on the relationship between Tragedy and Romance as modes of emplotments and engages with an older literary and philosophical device: the allegory. By this, the course attempts to tease out two problems. First, to come to terms with the method behind the allegory. Second, to read allegory in contemporary interventions to ask the questions of the emplotment of decoloniality.