Past Wellek Lecture Series

Since 1981, the Critical Theory Institute has sponsored an annual lecture series, named in honor of René Wellek (Yale University), whose library of works in critical theory is housed in Langson Library at the University of California, Irvine.

Each year, we have invited an internationally distinguished critical theorist to visit the campus to deliver a series of three lectures in which he or she develops his or her critical position and relates it to the contemporary theoretical scene. Each set of lectures is generally published in the Columbia university Press Wellek Library Lectures series.

For Wellek Library Lecturer Bibliographies and other Series information (1981-2009), click on this link.

	2024 Fred Moten — Professor of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature, New York University "Notes on (Tones of) Violence"
	2023 Rey Chow — Professor of Literature, Duke University "Guests, Voices, and other Ephemera: Intimations from some Filmworks about Asia"
	2021 Mahmoud Mamdani — Professor of Government, Columbia University "Studying Trans-African Slaveries: Pitfalls of the Atlantic Model"
	2019 Georges Didi-Huberman — École des hautes études en Sciences Sociales, Paris "How Try Tell? A Short Journey in the Papers of the Warsaw Ghetto"
	2018 Wendy Brown — Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley "Authoritarian Liberalism and Moral Nihilism: Neoliberalism's Accidental Legacies"
	2017 Aijaz Ahmad— University of California, Irvine Chancellor's Professor "The Return of the Repressed: Figurations of the National"
	2016 Katherine Hayles — Duke University "Precarious Narratives: The Risky Behaviors of Print Books No Longer Able to Tell Coherent Stories"
	2015 Catherine Malabou - European Graduate School "Metamorphoses of Intelligence"
	2014 Timothy Morton — Rice University "Dark Ecology: For a logic of future coexistence"
	2013 Peter Sloterdijk "Bastards, or: Self-made men and women. Reflections on genealogical disorders as a source of modern culture."
	2012 Bruno Latour— Professor, Institut d'études politques de Paris
	2011 Donna Haraway — Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz "Playing Cat's Cradle with Companion Species"
	2010 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o — Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine "The Hegelian Lord and Colonial Bondsman: Literature and the Politics of Knowing"

Past Lectures

2000s

1990s

1980s

	2009 Rosalyn Deutsche — Art History, Barnard College "Hiroshima after Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War"
	2008 Joan W. Scott — Harold F. Linder Professor, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton "Politics and Academic Freedom"
	2007 Elizabeth Grosz — Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers, The State Univerisity of New Jersey, New Brunswick "Chaos, Territory, Art"
	2006 Talal Asad — Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center "Thinking about Suicide Bombing"
	2005 David Harvey — Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center "Geographical Knowledges/Political Powers"
	2004 Achille Mbembe — Institute for Social & Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand "The Political Life of Sovereignty"
	2003 Angela Davis— Professor Emerita History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz) "Lectures on Abolition"
	2002 Paul Gilroy— Sociology & African American Studies, Yale University “Elements of Post-colonial melancholia”
	2001 Homi Bhabha— English & Afro-American Studies, Harvard University “The Quasi-Colonial: Scrambled Eggs and a Dish of Rice”
	2000 Gayatri Spivak— English and Comparative Literature, Columbia “The New Comparative Literature.”

	1999 Jean Baudrillard “The Vital Illusion.”
	1998 Judith Butler— Rhetoric, UC, Berkeley “Antigone's Claim: Kinship, Aberration and Psychoanalysis”
	1997 Harry Harootunian— East Asian Studies, History, New York University) “History's Disquiet: Modernity and Everyday Life.”
	1996 Étienne Balibar— Philosophie, Politique et Morale, U. Paris-X, Nanterre “On Politics and History: Presence, Cruelty and the Universals”
	1995 Rosalind Krauss— Art History, Columbia University “Formless: A Feat.”
	1994 Wolfgang Iser — English & Comparative Literature, UC Irvine “Variables of Interpretation: Iterations of Translatability.”
	1993 Evelyn Fox Keller— Rutgers “Metaphors of Twentieth- Century Biology.”
	1992 Geoffrey Hartman— English and Comparative Literature, Yale University “Three on ‘Culture.’”
	1991 Fredric Jameson— Literature, Critical Theory, Duke University “The Constraints of the Postmodern.”
	1990 Hélène Cixous— Writer and Professor, University of Paris, VIII “Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing.”

	1989 Edward Said— English, Columbia “Musical Elaborations.”
	1988 Murray Krieger— English and Comparative Literature, UC Irvine “A Reopening of Closure: Organicism Against Itself.”
	1987 Louis Marin— Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris “Pascalian Propositions for Today.”
	1986 Jean-François Lyotard— French & Italian, UC Irvine “The Law, the Form, the Event.”
	1985 J. Hillis Miller— English and Comparative Literature, Yale University “The Ethics of Reading.”
	1984 Jacques Derrida (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales) “Mémoires: Three Lectures for Paul de Man.”
	1983 Frank Kermode— Fellow, King’s College, Cambridge; Visiting Professor Columbia University “Forms of Attention.”
	1982 Perry Anderson—Historian, Historical Sociologist; Editor, New Left Review “In the Tracks of Historical Materialism.”
	1981 Harold Bloom— English and Comparative Literature, Yale “The Breaking of the Vessels: In Defense of Antithetical Criticism.”

Past Wellek Lecture Series

Past Lectures

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