DueDecember 15, 2025
11:59 PM EST
Notification of Decision
January 10, 2026
Conference Information
April 10–12, 2026
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA
Keynotes by Michael Denning, Jane Gaines, Achille Mbembe, Toril Moi, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Fredric Jameson (1934–2024) insisted on “imagining a future which might be radically and constitutionally other.” The urgency of this task rested on his understanding of Critical Theory “as a way of keeping the negative alive in a period in which praxis, the unity of the negative and the positive, itself seems suspended.” We invite proposals for papers on Jameson’s work and its implications for the future of Critical Theory.
Over the years, Critical Theory has received scholarly and popular attention; it has simultaneously been pronounced dead and an enduring threat. We invite scholars, including students, to join us at Duke University for a three-day celebration of Fredric Jameson’s enduring legacy—and to keep imagining, with him, the future of Critical Theory. We encourage contributions that think with, expand on, or depart from Jameson’s work within the fields of literature, Marxist theory, modern philosophy, psychoanalysis, cinema, architecture, and music, as well as addressing specific Jamesonian concepts, including but not limited to: allegory; the cultural logic of capitalism; dialectics; form; historicity; mode of production; modernism and postmodernism; periodization; political unconscious; realism; style; totality; utopia.
The conference is organized by Duke's Graduate Program in Literature, where Jameson taught for forty years, and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. We acknowledge the generous support of the Holberg Prize Committee, Norway.
