Evolving out of such earlier organizations as the Student Center for Post-Structuralist Studies, The Center for Critical Theory and Comparative Literature is an intensely collaborative, co-curricular research group drawing upon students, faculty, and independent scholars from various disciplines in the humanities, arts, and social sciences throughout the New York metropolitan area. Beginning in the late 1960s, the extraordinary transformations proffered by methodological advances in the hermeneutics of humanism and the ascent of post-structuralist discourse has fostered an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis and interpretation of culture that has, in spite of mammoth efforts, left only a peripheral imprint on standard (which is to say, non-elite) undergraduate curricula outside of explicitly interdisciplinary programs (Africana Studies, Women's Studies, et. al.) in the wake of the divisive "culture wars" that blighted so much of academia during the 1980s and 1990s.
As such, the Center intends to demystify the perceived difficulty of theory while applying it in novel and ingenuous ways to complexity and chaos theory, particle physics, and cultural economics; pursue annual, thematically-centered research projects drawing upon a variegated range of scholars and students (patterned after the more ambitious endeavors of UC Irvine's Critical Theory Institute); ideally, research will be presented in a spring colloquium series, culminating in a keynote lecture from an eminent scholar in the human, social, or hard sciences; encourage, facilitate, and expand ongoing student/faculty research; contribute to the intellectual vivacity of the campus by sponsoring film screenings, poetry readings, and concerts; take advantage of the campus' proximity to New York City in becoming the premier outlet for interdisciplinary academic research in the New York metropolitan area, paving the way for eventual integration into the SUNY administration.
Currently, the Center is working in close conjunction with the Brights Society of New Paltz in exploring the theoretical dimensions of such disparate and immutable cultural texts as spontaneous art, the philosophy of science, and the New Atheism. Other research projects involve the application of nonlinear dynamics and systems (pioneered by Manuel DeLanda) and multi-agent systems (i.e. agent-based models, following the lead of quantitative sociologist Nigel Gilbert) to emerging cultural trends, following in the materialist and non-Cartesian tradition of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Bruno Latour. We are not necessarily a haven for the vagaries of deconstructionism or Lacanian psychoanalysis, although they do offer more than a dollop of merit at times; students primarily interested in these subdisciplines would be better served by courses in the English and Philosophy departments.
For more information, please contact Sean Murphy at n01387907@newpaltz.edu.
