FHI, Short Residency | Christopher Newfield, "The Liberation of Criticism"

You are invited to Christopher Newfield's closing lecture, The Liberation of Criticism," as part of his Short Residency at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute from January 12, 2026 - January 23, 2026.

Most accounts of literary and cultural study reject or neglect the social demands placed on universities and all their disciplines, including theory, criticism, and race and gender studies. They understate the power of literature and criticism in the collective psychic life of culture-and diminish their own power within academia as well. I'll discuss several ways out of this trap, and suggest why criticism should be central to what Stuart Hall called the "new cultural order" that needs to be built.

Christopher Newfield was Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is now Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation in London. He has written a trilogy of books on the university as an intellectual and social institution: Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980 (Duke University Press, 2003); Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard University Press, 2008); and The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), is co-editor of The Limits of the Numerical (University of Chicago Press, 2022), and is co-author of What Metrics Matter? Academic Life in the Quantified University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023). His current projects involve the cultures of "AI," literary and cultural knowledge, the future of higher education, and the culture of social equality.

This lecture will be followed by a reception.

RSVP here