Criticism and interpretation

The ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’; autotheory; post-critique; theories of reading including descriptive and surface reading and reader response theory; psychoanalytic criticism; object relations; literary theory; political economic theory; cognitive literary studies; affect theory; ordinary language philosophy; institutional critique.

Style and ethics; the genealogy of aesthetic concepts; contemporary art practices; poetry and poetics; metaphor and metonymy; Medievalism; the eighteenth-century history of art writing and art criticism, including Diderot and Hazlitt.

The history of criticism.

Theories of the gift and cultural exchange; East-West aesthetics; Pacific literature and art; Ottoman art; Jewish-Palestinian writing; comparative literature; global modernisms; cultural economics.

Mid-century French film theory and questions of interpretation; self-translation, the Bildungsroman.

Intellectual history; book history; reception studies; literary history; art history; the new historicism; historicisms.

The bildungsroman; painting; sculpture; film; the novel; drama; poetry, the aesthetics and politics of form.

Film as a visual and textual form, with a focus on how such forms engage with larger aesthetic movements and traditions.

Ecocriticism; contemporary visual art; comics studies.

The closet; the ‘coupled voice’; queer identities; gender and queer performativity; interrogations of autotheory.

First, second and third wave, feminism; feminist interest in the performative nature of language; gender identity; drag.

Indigenous Art; Indigenous literature; Indigenous performance; Indigenist theory; indigenising curatorial practice; Everywhen; decolonisation practices; Indigenous art theory.

African American literature; Middle Eastern art; Black print culture; East-West aesthetics; Orientalism.

Archive studies and digital textual criticism.

Textual criticism; editorial theory and practice; print-making theory and aesthetics.

Indigenous material culture; museum studies; thing theory; visual culture; photography; the book (particularly the novel) as object of circulation; the ‘lives of texts’; collection histories; acquisition, classification and display of objects; the archive.

Media and digital texts and systems; ‘Strategic Stories’, media and cultural studies, media and digital texts and systems; film-and-literature.

Global intellectual history; world literature studies; transnational criticism; the Global South.

The relationship between literary culture and mass entertainment; the vernacular; periodicals and the popular press.

The fin de siècle; Modernist studies; twentieth-century avant gardes; nineteenth-century avant gardes; the contemporary.

The textualization of war; health communication; prevention campaigns; discourse studies; leadership theory; artistic, cultural, social and political forms of creative expression; ecocriticism; literature education; the culture industry; embedding Indigeneity into public discourse; the use of stories to link science and activism in global movements for climate justice and post-human Earth systems.