Society for Critical Exchange
Theory Institute
Fourteen distinguished scholars from the U.S. and Europe in three days of engaging discussion.
About SCE The Society for Critical Exchange is North America's oldest scholarly organization devoted to theory. Our various interdisciplinary projects, conferences, and symposia serve to advance the role of theory in academic and intellectual arenas. Our projects encompass a broad spectrum of disciplines, most prominently literary and cultural studies, legal studies and practices, economics, philosophy, and pedagogy.
The 2021 Institute The Society for Critical Exchange (SCE), this year co-sponsored by Stockholm University's Department of Culture and Aesthetics, and the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Houston-Victoria, is pleased to announce the topic of the twelfth annual SCE Theory Institute: The Politics of Paranoia..
The "paranoid style in American politics," as Richard Hofstader famously outlined it in the 1960s, is one in which threats, hostilities, and treacheries are seen as directed not toward an individual so much as "against a nation, a culture, a way of life." Hofstadter wrote in and about a Cold War scenario. Today, as we witness a resurgence of xenophobia, nationalism, and fascism, of conservative and aggressive masculinity, of mistrust of "elites," and a distrust of news, information, and facts, we may want to inquire into the nature of a more contemporary paranoid style; a paranoid style under neoliberalism. Taking both paranoia and style seriously, what cultural, theoretical, and political formations can be seen to express, resist, or otherwise configure the paranoid style of the 21st century?
The following presenters will be addressing these issues and other topics of interest.
Elisabeth Anker
Elisabeth Anker is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Political Science at George Washington University. She is the author of Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom and is finishing two books: Ugly Freedoms and The Wrath of Sovereignty.
"Ugly Freedoms: American Paranoia and the Promise of Sovereignty"
Peter Knight is a professor of American Studies at the University of Manchester, and currently visiting professor at Leiden University. He is the author of Conspiracy Culture, The Kennedy Assassination, Reading the Market, and Invested: The History of Popular Financial Advice.
"Surface Reading, Distant Reading and the Paranoid Style"
Frida Beckman
Frida Beckman is Professor of Literature at the Department of Aesthetics and Culture at Stockholm University, Sweden. Recent work includes the monograph Culture Control Critique, the critical biography Gilles Deleuze, and the edited collection Control Culture.
"Paranoid Identity Politics"
Sophia A. McClennen
Sophia A. McClennen is professor of international affairs and comparative literature at Penn State University and founding director of the Center for Global Studies. She has published twelve books including Pranksters vs. Autocrats: Why Dilemma Actions Advance Nonviolent Activism with Srdja Popovic and Globalization and Latin American Cinema.
"Be Really Afraid: What Parody Does with Political Paranoia"
Clare Birchal
Clare Birchal is Reader in Contemporary Culture in the English Department at King's College London. She is the author of Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip and Shareveillance: The Dangers of Openly Sharing and Covertly Collecting Data.
"The Paranoid Style for Sale: How to Become a Conspiracy Entrepreneur"
Timothy Melley
Timothy Melley is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Center at Miami University. He is the author of The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America, and numerous essays and short stories.
"The Melodramatic Style in American Politics and Other Modes of Narrative Suspicion"
Michael Butter
Michael Butter is Professor of American Studies at the University of Tu bingen. He is the author of The Nature of Conspiracy Theories and Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project "Populism and Conspiracy Theory."
"Are Conspiracy Theorists Paranoid?"
Paul Allen Miller
Paul Allen Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Miller is the author of ten books on theory, Latin poetry, and Greek philosophy. His eleventh book, Foucault's Late Lectures on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth will be published by Bloomsbury.
"Tyranny, Fear, and Parrhesia: Is There a Place for Truth in the Neoliberal University"
Elena Chiti
Associate professor at Stockholm University, Elena Chiti is a cultural historian of contemporary Egypt. She currently works on criminal narratives as sources to study ideological change from below.
"Motherhood as Innocence: Conspiracy Theories in the Resignification of Rayya and Sakina's Criminal Myth in Present-day Egypt"
Kenneth J. Saltman
Kenneth J. Saltman is a professor of Educational Policy Studies at University of Illinois Chicago. His books include The Swindle of Innovative Educational Finance and Scripted Bodies: Corporate Power, Smart Technology, and the Undoing of Public Education.
Jeffrey R. Di Leo
Jeffrey R. Di Leo is professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria. He is also editor of symplok , and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange and its Winter Theory Institute. His recent books include Catastrophe and Higher Education and Vinyl Theory.
"Populism, Pedagogy, and Paranoia"
Nicole Simek
Nicole Simek is Professor of French and Interdisciplinary Studies at Whitman College. She is the author of Hunger and Irony in the French Caribbean: Literature, Theory, and Public Life and translator of Maryse Condé's The Belle Créole.
"Black Paranoia and the Reparative Politics of Speculative Fiction"
Robin Truth Goodman
Robin Truth Goodman is a Professor of English at Florida State University. Her published works include Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism, The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st Century Feminist Theory, and Promissory Notes: On the Literary Conditions of Debt.
"Paranoid Life"
Zahi Zalloua
Zahi Zalloua is the Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature; Director of Race and Ethnic Studies and professor of French and Gender Studies at Whitman College. His most recent publications include Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future and Žižek on Race Toward an Anti-Racist Future.
"Palestinian Paranoia"
Peter Hitchcock
Peter Hitchcock is a Professor of English at the Graduate Center and Baruch College of CUNY. He is also on the faculty of the Film Studies and Women's Studies Certificate Programs. He is currently Associate Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the GC. Recent publications include work on discipline, canons and canonicity, securitization, and the Paris Commune.
"Perhaps Ambivalence May be Ambiguous: The Art of Hedging"
The Institute will take place from Thursday, June 21 to Sunday, June 24 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Presentations will take place at Stockholm University. Additional details regarding the Society for Critical Exchange or the upcoming Winter Theory Institute can be found at the Society for Critical Exchange's website the Society for Critical Exchange's website or by contacting Executive Director Jeffrey R. Di Leo.