Our director Matthew Engelke is teaching a summer seminar at Cornell University

Program Overview

In an intensive six-week course of study, faculty members, graduate students and independent scholars from around the world, in the humanities and social sciences, explore recent developments in critical theory. The 2020 Session is scheduled for June 14 – July 23.

Participants work with the SCT’s core faculty of distinguished scholars and theorists in one of four six-week seminars. Each faculty member offers, in addition, a public lecture and a colloquium (based on an original paper) which are attended by the entire group.

The program also includes mini-seminars taught by scholars who visit for shorter periods. Finally, throughout the six weeks, distinguished theorists visit the SCT as lecturers.

Magic / six-week seminar

This seminar focuses on the cultural history of magic: as an idea, as a practice, and as a tool with which to wield power and induce wonder. Special attention is given to magic and/in modernity against larger backdrops of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, (post) colonialism, and (post) secularism. Readings are drawn from philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, drama, literary studies, history, sociology, history of science, and political theory. Cases will include colonial Sudan, Reformation England, Thatcher-era London, France (from the Second Empire to the fin de siècle), Puritan Salem, and post-Apartheid South Africa.