Teaching
I’ve taught courses on a wide-range of subjects since starting my first full-time position at McMaster University in 1999.
At the undergraduate level, I’ve taught courses on Cultural Studies and Visual Culture; Cultural Studies: History, Theory, Practice; Globalization and Visual Culture; History and Theory of Criticism; Inquiry in the Social Sciences; Literature and Film; Modern Critical Theory; Reading Politics: Class and Ideology; and Reading the Tube: Television and Cultural Studies.
At the graduate level, courses include: The Frankfurt School; Globalization and Culture; Issues in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory; Karl Marx; Literary History: Collectivity; Marxist Literary and Cultural Theory; and Postcolonial Literary Theory.
I’ve also taught courses on Globalization and Mass Culture at the University of Sao Paulo; The Future of Culture: American Studies and Cultural Theory at Humboldt University in Berlin; Introduction to Cultural Studies at the National Autonomous University (UNAM) in Mexico City; and Culture as Resource: Culture and Democracy in the Global System at Central European University in Budapest.
Current Courses
- English 567 Literary History: Cultural History: An Introduction (Winter 2011)
- English 800/801: PhD Colloquium (2010-2011)
A. Cultural Theory: An Introduction
The primary aim of this course is to give graduate students in English and Film Studies an opportunity to focus on the complex relationships that exist between forms of power, the constitution of knowledge, and the activity of contemporary criticism. By working through the ideas and concepts deployed in a number of influential essays in cultural theory, the goal is to enhance students’ critical vocabularies and to challenge the ‘commonsense’ of contemporary theory in an effort to help students develop new insights into their own projects and fields of interests. With respect to the study of culture, what can we do with the theoretical concepts and approaches we have inherited? What relevance do these have to contemporary circumstances and situations? What are the connections that we have identified between knowledge and power? And how do we imagine that criticism intervenes in this relationship to interrupt regimes of knowledge/power in order to create new ways of thinking, knowing, acting, and feeling? These are the kinds of macro-questions that will guide us as we work through key concepts in cultural theory across seven areas: culture, power, ideology, scale and space, time and history, subjectivity and collectivity.
Primary text
Imre Szeman and Tim Kaposy, eds. Cultural Theory: An Anthology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Print.
Other materials will be made available throughout the course
Schedule
Jan 14 – Intro
Jan 21 – Culture (Arnold, Veblen, Williams, Hall)
Jan 28 – Culture (Marcuse, Horkheimer & Adorno, Jameson, Bourdieu)
Feb 4 – Power (Marx, Schmitt, Foucault)
Feb 11 – Power (Foucault, Deleuze, Hardt & Negri)
Feb 18 – Ideology (Marx, Lukacs, Gramsci)
Mar 4 – Ideology (Althusser, Hall, Zizek)
Mar 11 – Space & Scale (de Certeau, Appaduria, Massey, Harvey)
Mar 18 – Temporality (Foucault, Williams, Braudel, Guha)
Mar 25 – Subjectivity (Fanon, Gilroy, Lacan, Irigaray)
Apr 1 – Subjectivity (Haraway, Butler, Sedgwick)
Apr 8 – Collectivity (Nancy, Agamben, Blanchot)
B. PhD Colloquium (co-taught with Garry Watson)
Required Texts
● Ian Angus, Love the Questions: University Education and the Enlightenment (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2009). 176 pgs.
● Talal Asad, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood, Wendy Brown, Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (UC Berkeley, 2009). 154 pgs.
● Coursepack
Schedule
● September 10
Topic: Emancipated Thought?
Reading: Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator”
Recommended: Jacques Rancière, “The Misadventures of Critical Thought”
Students are encouraged to attend the lecture by Nicholas Brown (U of Illinois-Chicago), “Hegel and Synthesis,” Thursday, September 16 (Location and Time TBA)
● October 8
Topic: The Past, Present and Future of the University
Readings: Ian Angus, Love the Questions: University Education and the Enlightenment; Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (excerpt)
Students are encouraged to attend sessions and talks that are part of the 10th Annual Critical Race and Anti-Colonial Studies Conference: “Race-Making and the State: Between Postracial Neoliberalism and Racialized Terrorism.” Keynotes: Maria Campbell, L.H.M. Ling, Achille Mbembe, Patricia Monture, Sherene Razack, Sunera Thobani, and Robert A. Williams, Jr.
Students are encouraged to attend sessions and talks at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy, which will be held on campus Oct. 14-16.
● November 5
Topic: The Examined Life
Screening: Examined Life (dir. Astra Taylor, 2008)
Reading: François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (excerpts)
● December 3
Topic: Rethinking the University
Reading: Alasdair MacIntyre, “Reconceiving the University as an Institution as the Lecture as a Genre”; Bill Readings, “The University without Culture?”
● January 13
Topic: Tradition, Virtue and Critique
Readings: Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (excerpt); Fredric Jameson, “Aristotelian Marxism in Alasdair MacIntyre”; Terry Eagleton, “Subjects and Truths”; T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent”
● February 10
Topic: Criticism and Belief
Reading: Talal Asad, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood, Wendy Brown, Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech
● March 24
Student presentations: What is the place of tradition in criticism?