Theory Now: Practices, Predicaments, and Possibilities

Neil Brenner is the Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology at the University of Chicago and a fellow of 3CT. He currently serves as a Chair of the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU) at the University of ChicagoPrevious books include New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question (2019) and Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays (2016). With Swarnabh Ghosh, he is currently working on the book The Hinterland Question: Capitalist Urbanization in the Shatter Zone.

Adrienne Brown is Associate Professor in the departments of English and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago, where she is also Faculty Director of Arts + Public Life. Her first book, The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (2017)—winner of the Modernist Studies Association’s 2018 First Book Prize—recovers the skyscraper’s drastic effects not only on the shape of the city but the racial sensorium of its residents. Her most recent book, The Residential is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership (2024), uses literary and bureaucratic archives to chart how mass homeownership changed the definition, perception, and value of race. Brown’s writing has also appeared in Designo, Curbed, Jewish Currents, Harvard Design Magazine, Foreign Policy, and Public Books.

Bill Brown is the Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture, appointed in the Department of English and the Department of Visual Arts, and a fellow of 3CT. He has been a co-editor of Critical Inquiry since 1993. Working at the intersection of literary, visual, and material cultures, he has developed such concepts as “misuse value,” the “materiality effect,” and “redemptive reification” in the effort to apprehend the embeddedness of the human within various object worlds. He is the author of The Material Unconscious (1997), A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2004), and Other Things (2015), and of essays that explore such topics as “thing theory,” “textual materialism,” and the “obsolescence of the human.” His current project on “Re-Assemblage” asks how the history of assemblage practice in the arts might contribute to the assemblage theory deployed within the social sciences.

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and formerly the Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. They are the author of numerous books, including most recently the national bestseller Who’s Afraid of Gender (Macmillan, 2024). They served as a founding director, with Martin Jay, of the Critical Theory Program at UC Berkeley and received a Mellon Foundation grant to found and develop the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (2016–20) where they serve now as Co-Chair of the Board and editorial member of Critical Times. They have received numerous awards and honorary degrees for their scholarship in addition to being active in several human rights organizations.

Jodi Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and Professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Their research centers around Indigenous studies, Indigenous feminist, queer, and Two-Spirit studies, and video game studies. Their 2011 book, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press), won the 2011 Best First Book of the Year award from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association and the 2012 Wordcraft Circle Award for Academic Work of the Year. Byrd also co-edits the Northwestern University Press’ Critical Insurgencies series. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, they were a Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Byrd earned their PhD in English Literature from the University of Iowa in 2002. 

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College at the University of Chicago, with a courtesy appointment in the School of Law. He is also a fellow of 3CT. His work engages with postcolonial thought, historical difference, and the intersections of history and climate change. Among his numerous publications are One Planet, Many Worlds (2023), The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021), The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth (2015), and Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000/2008). Chakrabarty is a founding member of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, a consulting editor of Critical Inquiry, and a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies, as well as an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and the British Academy.

Anita Chari is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon, and a political theorist, somatic practitioner, and writer. Her research focuses on the Frankfurt School, Western Marxism, and the relationship between Critical Theory, contemporary art, and embodied practices. Her recently published book, A User’s Manual to Claire Fontaine (Lenz Press, 2024) has emerged from a decade-long conversation with the feminist conceptual artist, whose work provides the theme and title of the 2024 Venice Biennial, Foreigners Everywhere. Her interdisciplinary scholarly research explores the political significance of embodiment practices for our times and has appeared in venues including Contemporanea: A Glossary of the XXI Century (MIT Press, forthcoming, 2024) and Flash Art, Claire Fontaine: Newsfloor  (Walter König, 2020). She is co-founder of Embodying Your Curriculum™, an organization that supports academics, educators, and social justice leaders to bring embodiment practices into higher education.

Cathy J. Cohen is the Chair of the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, the David and Mary Winton Green Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and a fellow of 3CT. She has held several leadership roles, including chair of the Department of Political Science and deputy provost for Graduate Education. Cohen is the author of The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (1999) and Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (2010), and co-editor of Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto, 1997). She leads the GenForward Survey and the Black Youth Project and was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2020. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and co-editor of the Transgressing Boundaries book series.

Anton Ford is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Deputy Dean of the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago and a fellow of 3CT. He specializes in Practical Philosophy, focusing on Action Theory, Ethics, and Political Philosophy, with key interests in Anscombe, Aristotle, and Marx. He is co-editor of Essays on Anscombe’s Intention (Harvard University Press, 2014) and is currently working on a monograph, The Objectification of Agency, exploring the metaphysics and epistemology of human action. His publications include “The Parts and Whole of Plato’s Republic” (with Ben Laurence, 2024), “Naïve Action Explanationism” (Analytic Philosophy, 2019), and “The Province of Human Agency” (Noûs, 2018).

Adom Getachew is Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago, and she is a fellow at 3CT. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory. Her work focuses on the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean. She is the author of Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019) and co-editor, with Jennifer Pitts, of W. E. B. Du Bois: International Thought (2022). She is currently working on a second book on the intellectual origins and political practices of Garveyism, the black nationalist/pan-African movement, which had its height in the 1920s. Her public writing has appeared in Dissent, Foreign Affairs, The London Review of Books, The Nation, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times.

Julian Go is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, specializing in the social logics and impacts of empires, colonialism, and postcolonial/decolonial thought. He is a 3CT faculty fellow. His work focuses on the US and British empires, with books like American Empire and the Politics of Meaning (2008), Patterns of Empire (2011), and Policing Empires (2023), which examines the relationship between imperialism and police militarization. Go has also contributed to global historical sociology and transnational field theory, co-editing Fielding Transnationalism (2016) and Global Historical Sociology (2016). His book Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (2016) addresses key questions in postcolonial thought. He is currently working on a project exploring anticolonial thought as social theory, reflected in his 2022 British Journal of Sociology lecture and a forthcoming edited volume. Go’s work has earned numerous accolades, including the Lewis A. Coser Award from the American Sociological Association.

Ryan Cecil Jobson is an anthropologist and social critic of the Caribbean and the Americas. His research and teaching engage issues of energy and extractivism, states and sovereignty, climate and crisis, and race and capital. He is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago where he also holds faculty appointments in the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU), the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. Jobson is Associate Editor of the journal Transforming Anthropology. He is currently working on a collection of essays exploring climate change and the receding horizon of habitability in the Caribbean along with a manuscript on anthropological theory and method in an era of climate extinction.

Rochona Majumdar is a historian of modern India with a focus on Indian cinema, gender, and marriage in colonial India, and intellectual thought. She is the George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in the Departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Cinema and Media Studies, and the College, and a faculty fellow at 3CT. Majumdar is the author of Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony (2021), Writing Postcolonial History (2010) and Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (2009). l. She has edited (with  Upal Chakrabarti and Sukanya Sarbadhikary) The Hindoo/ Presidency College: Excellence and Exclusion (forthcoming 2025), (with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Andrew Satori) From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (2007) and (with Margrit Pernau, Helge Jordheim et al) Civilizing Emotions (2016). Majumdar is a regular contributor (in Bengali) to the  Anandabazar Patrika. She is currently working on the leading Bengali Muslim intellectual, cultural theorist, and constitutional thinker, Abul Mansur Ahmad (1898-1979).

William T. S. Mazzarella writes and teaches on the political anthropology of mass publicity, critical theory, affect and aesthetics, psychoanalysis, ritual and performance, and the occult shadow of the modern. He is the Neukom Family Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College at the University of Chicago, Associate Faculty in the Divinity School, and a faculty fellow at 3CT. His books include Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (2003), Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Society (2013), The Mana of Mass Society (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and, with Eric Santner and Aaron Schuster, Sovereignty, Inc: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment (University of Chicago Press, 2020). He is also co-editor, with Raminder Kaur, of Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (Indiana University Press, 2009), and editor of K. D. Katrak: Collected Poems (Poetrywala, 2016). He is currently completing an ethnography/non-fiction novel called Magnetizer: A Fable of Spirit and starting work on a collaborative investigation of atmospheric, immaterial communication from a neurodivergent perspective.

Rosalind C. Morris is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She explores the histories and social lives produced in the interstices of industrial and resource-based capitalism, especially concerned with how technological and media forms relate to these sites. Morris’s work encompasses a variety of forms and media, from scholarly articles to essayistic prose and ethnographic monographs. Her media works include documentary film and expanded cinematic installation, as well as narrative film. Among her recent works are the documentary film, We are Zama Zama, which premiered as an official selection of the ENCOUNTERS International Documentary Film Festival in 2021, and the flexible multi-media installation, “The Zama Zama Project,” which was an official selection of the Berlinale Forum Expanded in 2021. Morris’s poetry has appeared in venues such as Ideas and Futures, Literary Imagination, and the Capilano Review, among other publications.

Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he is Faculty Director of the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights and a fellow of 3CT. His research focuses on the global political economy of life sciences and biomedicine, with an emphasis on India, South Africa, and the U.S. He is the author of Biocapital (2006) and Pharmocracy (2017), and editor of Lively Capital (2012). His current project examines the intersections of health, law, and constitutionalism in South Africa, titled “Just Health?: Law, Constitutionalism, and Postcolonial Disease.” Sunder Rajan’s work also explores ethnographic methods and theory from the global South, particularly in Multi-situated: Ethnography as Diasporic Praxis (2021). Additionally, he is involved in the collaborative project Pulmonographies with writer Stacy Hardy and composer Neo Muyanga, exploring the colonial and postcolonial histories of tuberculosis in South Africa, funded by the Neubauer Collegium.

Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College, Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT), and Associate Faculty in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She is the recipient of the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award and an NSF fellowship. Her publications include three books: Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999; with a new preface, 2015); Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (2008); and Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (2019). For this newest book, she received numerous awards, including the Gordon J. Laing Award for the book that brings the most distinction to the University of Chicago Press (2022). Wedeen’s co-edited volume with Joseph Masco, entitled Conspiracy/Theory, was published in January 2024. Her edited volume with Prathama Banerjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sanjay Seth on reimagining cosmopolitanism will be published in 2025. She is now beginning work on a book on revolutionary disappointment and recalibration and another on interpretive methods in political theory.

Gabriel Winant is a historian focused on the social structures of inequality in modern American capitalism. He is Associate Professor of History and the College at the University of Chicago and a recent fellow of 3CT. His research examines capitalism as a complex social order, shaped by economic production, formal employment, and social reproduction. His first book, The Next Shift (2021), explores the rise of the health care industry in post-manufacturing Rust Belt America. His second project, Our Weary Years, looks at survival strategies among working-class migrants in early 20th-century America, exploring informal, cooperative, and illicit practices in the context of mass production. Before joining the University of Chicago, he was a visiting scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he frequently writes for publications such as The Nation and n+1.

Linda Zerilli is the Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College. She was the 2010–16 Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, where she continues in her capacity as a leading scholar and teacher in the field, and she is a fellow of 3CT. Zerilli is the author of Signifying Woman (1994), Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (2005), A Democratic Theory of Judgment (2016), and A Democratic Theory of Truth (2025). She has been a Fulbright Fellow, a two-time Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and a Stanford Humanities Center Fellow. In 2016, Zerilli won the University faculty award for excellence in graduate teaching and mentoring. She has served on the executive committee of Political Theory and the advisory boards of The American Political Science Review, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Constellations, and Culture, Theory, and Critique.