Overview

The Designated Emphasis (DE) in Critical Theory permits interested graduate students already enrolled in UC Berkeley PhD programs to specialize in critical theory and to obtain certification of this specialization while pursuing the doctoral degree in their home departments. (The program in Critical Theory is not an independent degree-granting program.) Students admitted to the program's DE and who complete its requirements will receive a parenthetical notation to that effect on their doctoral degrees.

Critical Theory is typically associated with the work of the Frankfurt School; that ongoing tradition of theory figures significantly in the DE curriculum. However, Berkeley's program in Critical Theory broadens and extends the meaning of critical theory to include nineteenth-century philosophers of critique, as well as contemporary critical theoretical work on politics, economics, art and culture, religion, nationalism, postnationalism, and various kinds of identity formation. Above all, Critical Theory at UC Berkeley emphasizes the centrality of theoretical critique to the examination of contemporary values; the powers that organize political, social, cultural, and economic life; and modes of justification and legitimization for cultural inquiry and sociopolitical analysis.

Undergraduate Program

There is no undergraduate program in Critical Theory.

Graduate Program

Critical Theory: Designated Emphasis (DE)

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Courses

Critical Theory

Faculty and Instructors

+ Indicates this faculty member is the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award.

Faculty

+ Elizabeth Abel, Professor. Feminist theory, psychoanalysis, Virginia Woolf, race and gender.
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Rakesh Bhandari, Lecturer. Classical Social Theory's Images of Asia, The Juridical Aspects of Unfree Labor Relations, The Role of Luxury Consumption in Economic Growth, The Nature and Limits of Keynesian Intervention, The Discourses of Social Darwinism.

Dan Blanton, Associate Professor. Modernism, modern poetry, 19th- and 20th-century British literature, aesthetic and critical theory.
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Natalia Brizuela, Associate Professor. Spanish & Portuguese.
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Julia Q. Bryan-Wilson, Professor. Contemporary art, feminist theory, queer theory.
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+ Michael Burawoy, Professor. Sociology, Russia, capitalism, industrial workplaces, postcolonialism, socialism, global ethnography, Hungary.
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Anthony J. Cascardi, Dean of Arts & Humanities. English, comparative literature, literature, Spanish, Portuguese, philosophy, aesthetics, early modern literature, French, Spanish Baroque.
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Sharad Chari, Professor. Geography as history of the present and as Earth/world-writing, social theory, political economy, development, agrarian studies, labor and work, racial/sexual capitalism, Black radical tradition, biopolitical struggle, oceanic humanities, photography, South Asia, South Africa, Indian Ocean .
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Lawrence Cohen, Professor. Social cultural anthropology, medical and psychiatric anthropology, critical gerontology, lesbian and gay studies, feminist and queer theory.
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Stephen Collier, Professor. Soviet urban planning and post-Soviet urban and social welfare transformation, infrastructure and politics, neoliberalism and governmental rationality, emergency government in the United States, urban vulnerability and resilience, climate change.
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Eglantine L. Colon, Assistant Professor. French.

Marianne Constable, Professor. Law and language, legal rhetoric and philosophy, social and political thought, Anglo-American legal history, Continental philosophy, law and society.
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Raul Coronado, Associate Professor. Ethnic Studies.

Whitney Davis, Professor. Ancient art, Modern Art, art theory.
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Ivonne Del Valle, Associate Professor. Colonial period in Mexico, internal colonialism in Mexico, Jesuits (Loyola, Acosta, Baegert), Baroque and Enlightenment from a colonial perspective, technology and environment, drainage of Mexico City lakes, Christianity and Pre-Hispanic religions .
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Mary Ann Doane, Professor. Feminist theory, semiotics, cinema, media, cultural theory, archaeology of media technology, poststructuralism.
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Samera Esmeir, Associate Professor. Critical theory, Middle Eastern Studies, Legal and political thought, law and society, legal histories, colonialism and post-colonialism.
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Karen Feldman, Professor. Critical theory, aesthetics, literary theory, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Arendt, Benjamin, 18th-20th century German thought, Hegel, Adorno.
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Keith Feldman, Associate Professor. Critical theory, US cultural studies, Israel-Palestine, theories of race and ethnicity, comparative diaspora studies, public humanities.
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Catherine Flynn, Associate Professor. Modernism, Irish, British, comparative literature, critical theory, Avant-Gardes, James Joyce, Flann O'Brien.
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Anne-Lise François, Associate Professor. Popular culture, English, comparative literature, the modern period, comparative romanticisms, lyric poetry, the psychological novel, novel of manners, gender, critical theory, literature, philosophy, fashion.
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Deniz Gokturk, Professor. German literature, German cinema, transnational cinemas, German-Turkish-European-American intersections in cinema, performance and spectatorship and reception, intertextuality and intermediality and translation, the politics and poetics of migration and globalization, urban imaginaries and mediations of place, theories of diversity and nationalism, comedy and community, modern rituals of regulating identity and authority and mobility.
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Amanda Goldstein, Associate Professor. Enlightenment and Romantic literature and science, with particular interests in rhetoric and poetics, pre-Darwinian biology, and materialist theories of history, poetry, and nature .
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Marcial Gonzalez, Associate Professor. Chicano and Chicana literature, twentieth-century American ethnic literatures, theory of the novel, marxism, critical theory, farm worker social movements.
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David Singh Grewal, Professor. Legal and political theory, intellectual history, intellectual property law and biotechnology.
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Jocelyne Guilbault, Professor. Cultural politics, Caribbean, popular and traditional musics, nation, diaspora, cultural entrepreneurship.
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Charles Hirschkind, Associate Professor. Islam, anthropology, religious practice, media technologies, political community, Middle East, Europe.
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Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Associate Professor. Modern German and European History, Human Rights and Internationalism, global urban history, critical theory.
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Seth M. Holmes, Associate Professor. Immigration and migration, medical anthropology with foci on social theory and ethnography, social studies of medicine and science, social difference related to race, social difference related to socioeconomic status, social difference related to citizenship, social difference related to gender, social difference related to sexuality, the naturalization and normalization of social hierarchies and health disparities, social suffering and symbolic violence, urban and rural Latin America and North America, population health with focus on global health, population health with focus on health disparities, population health with focus on social determinants of health.
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Shannon Jackson, Professor and Associate Vice Chancellor for Arts + Design. Rhetoric, performance studies, American studies, 20th century art movements and critical theory, local culture and intercultural citizenship in turn-of-the-century United States, history and theory of theatre and performance art.
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Abdul R. JanMohamed, Professor. Critical theory, theory of subjection, postcolonial literature, culture, and theory, African American fiction, and minority discourse .
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Donna V. Jones, Associate Professor. Critical theory, English, modernism, literature and philosophy, literature of the Americas, literature of the African Diaspora, postcolonial literature and theory, narrative and historiography.
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Tony Kaes, Professor. Film studies, modern literature, literary and cultural theory, cinema, interdisciplinary and comparative aspects of Weimar culture, contemporary literature and film, literary theory, theory of cultural studies, film history, film theory, history of cinema.
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Robert G. Kaufman, Associate Professor. Modern/contemporary poetry and poetics, aesthetics, literary theory, and history of criticism, Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the arts.
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Celeste Langan, Associate Professor. English, romantic poetry, 19th century literature, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Hardy, Rousseau, the French Revolution, Marxist theory, literature and the social sciences.
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Niklaus Largier, Professor. Religion, literature, German, history of medieval and early modern German literature, theology, mysticism, secularism, senses, sensuality, history of emotions, passions, asceticism, flagellation, sexuality.
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Grace Lavery, Associate Professor. Critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, Pacific, 19th century British literature, cultural studies.
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Zeus Leonardo, Professor. Ideologies and discourses in education, education.
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Michael Lucey, Professor. Pragmatics, the novel, sexuality studies, comparative literature, French, French literature, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, British literature and culture, social and literary theory, cultural studies of music, studies of language in use, theories of practice, twentieth-century American literature .
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Colleen Lye, Associate Professor. Postcolonial theory, critical theory, cultural studies, Asian American literature, 20th and 21st century literature, world literature.
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Sara Mameni, Assistant Professor. Art, aesthetics and visual culture, transnational feminist and queer of color theories, Arab diaspora, Muslim diaspora, militarism, critical race theory, critical postcolonial theory, Anthropocene, extractive economies and petrocultures.
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Tom McEnaney, Associate Professor. Latin American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, media studies, radio, 20th century American literature, architecture, linguistic anthropology, digital humanities.
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Ramona Naddaff, Associate Professor. Rhetoric, aesthetics, theory of the novel, ancient Greek philosophy and literature, history of philosophy, contemporary French thought.
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Alva Noe, Professor. Cognitive science, phenomenology, consciousness, philosophy, theory of perception, theory of art, Wittgenstein, analytic philosophy origins.
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Maura Bridget Nolan, Associate Professor. Chaucer, drama, Middle English literature, Gower, Lydgate, medieval, 16th century, literary form, style.
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Andreja Novakovic, Associate Professor. 19th and 20th century continental philosophy, G.W.F. Hegel.

Fumi Okiji, Assistant Professor . Black study, Frankfurt School Critical Theory, sound and music studies, black feminist theory.
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Stefania Pandolfo, Professor. Cultural anthropology, Islam, Middle East, theories of subjectivity, postcolonial criticism, anthropology and literature, the Maghreb, mental illness.
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Diego Pirillo, Associate Professor. Renaissance Europe, History of Books and Reading, history of political thought, History of Historiography.
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Djordje Popović, Assistant Professor . Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literature, critical theory, comparative literature.
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James Porter, Professor. Classical Studies, philosophy, critical theory, aesthetics, Nietzsche, Auerbach.
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Harsha Ram, Associate Professor. Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature.
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Dylan John Riley, Professor. Political sociology, comparative historical sociology, social theory.
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Juana Maria Rodriguez, Professor. Sexual politics, LGBTQ communities, Latino issues, women of color feminisms, ethnic studies, queer activism, transgender studies, queer kinship.
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Poulomi Saha, Associate Professor. Asian American, South Asian, critical theory, gender and sexuality, cultural studies.
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Leslie Salzinger, Associate Professor. Political economy, feminist theory, finance, sociology of gender, Gender and Work, gendering of transnational processes.
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+ Debarati Sanyal, Professor. Violence, poetry, the relationship between literary form, politics in 19th-century France, the connection between performance, performativity, ethics in modernist texts.
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Hans Sluga, Professor. Political philosophy, recent European philosophy, history of analytic philosophy, Frege, Wittgenstein, Foucault.
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Barbara Spackman, Professor. Feminist theory, psychoanalysis, culture, fascism, gender studies, comparative literature, Italian studies, narrative, European decadence, travel writing.
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Eric Stanley, Assistant Professor. Critical prison studies, queer/trans social movements, anti-colonial feminism.
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Mario Telo, Professor. Greek literature, Roman drama, critical theory.
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Soraya Tlatli, Associate Professor. Francophone literature, colonial and postcolonial studies, literature and psychoanalysis, twentieth-century continental philosophy.
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Christopher Lawrence Tomlins, Professor. Legal history and the history and law of slavery.
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Sarah Vaughn, Assistant Professor. Cultural anthropology, post-colonial science, environment, climate change, vulnerability, theories of liberalism, Caribbean, Latin America.
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Leti Volpp, Professor. Citizenship, law and culture, identity (especially race and gender), immigration and migration, Asian American studies.
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Loic Wacquant, Professor. Sociology.
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Nathaniel Wolfson, Assistant Professor. Spanish & Portuguese.
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Damon R. Young, Associate Professor. French and Film/Media.
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Nasser Zakariya, Associate Professor. Rhetoric.

Emeritus

Martin Jay, Professor Emeritus. History.

Charles F. Altieri, Professor Emeritus. Literature and the visual arts, Wittgenstein, Modern American poetry, Contemporary American poetry, history of aesthetic philosophy.
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+ Wendy L. Brown, Professor Emerite. Feminist theory, critical theory, theories of neoliberalism, public higher education, nineteenth and twentieth century political theory.
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Judith Butler, Professor Emerite. Critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, comparative literature, 19th and 20th century continental philosophy, social and political thought, philosophy and literature.
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Suzanne Guerlac, Professor Emerita. Nationalism, literature, philosophy, 19th- and 20th-century literature, myths of literature and theory, contemporary cultural criticism.

Gillian P. Hart, Professor Emerita. Geography.

+ Francine R. Masiello, Professor Emerita. Gender theory, culture, globalization, comparative literature, Spanish, Latin American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, comparative North and South literatures.
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