Cathy Caruth

Cathy Caruth is Winship Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature and English and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1988 and is the author of Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke Wordsworth, Kant, Freud (Johns Hopkins UP, 1991) and Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Johns Hopkins UP, 1996); she is also editor of Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Johns Hopkins UP, 1995) and with Deborash Esch of Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing (Rutgers University Press, 1995). Robert Jay Lifton, M.D. describes her as "one of the most innovative scholars on what we call trauma, and on our ways of perceiving and conceptualizing that still mysterious phenomenon."

Wendy Brown

Professor Brown's fields of interest include the history of political theory, nineteenth and twentieth century Continental theory, critical theory, and cultural theory (including feminist theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory). She is best known for intertwining the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Frankfurt School theorists, Foucault, and contemporary Continental philosophers to critically interrogate formations of power, political identity, citizenship, and political subjectivity in contemporary liberal democracies. Brown's current work focuses on the relationship of political sovereignty to global capital and other transnational forces, including those associated with religion, law, culture and moral discourse.

Professor Brown received her Ph.D in Political Philosophy from Princeton University in 1983. Prior to coming to Berkeley in 1999, she taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at Williams College. Brown's books include Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, 1988), States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, 1995), Politics Out of History (Princeton, 2001), Left Legalism/Left Critique, co-edited with Janet Halley (Duke, 2002), Edgework: Critical Essays in Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, 2005), and Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, 2006). She has lectured widely in Europe and North America, has held a number of distinguished visiting lectureships, and has recently been a Senior Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a UC Berkeley Humanities Fellow.

In the Political Science Department, Professor Brown offers undergraduate courses on early modern and modern European political theory and on political freedom. She offers graduate courses in the history of European political thought and on contemporary problems in political theory drawn from her own research, including, in recent years, sovereignty, critique, humanism, and the question of the autonomy of the political. She also teaches in the newly developed Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, an interdisciplinary graduate curriculum.

David Theo Goldberg

David Theo Goldberg, Ph.D., is the Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the University of California system-wide research facility for the human sciences and theoretical research in the arts. He also holds faculty appointments as Professor of Comparative Literature and Criminology, Law and Society at UC Irvine, and is a Fellow of the UCI Critical Theory Institute. Professor Goldberg's work ranges over issues of political theory, race and racism, ethics, law and society, critical theory, cultural studies and, increasingly, digital humanities. Together with Cathy Davidson of Duke University, he founded the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) to promote partnerships between the human sciences, arts, social sciences and technology and supercomputing interests for advancing research, teaching and public outreach.

He has authored numerous books, including The Racial State (2002); Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America (1997); Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (1993); and Ethical Theory and Social Issues: Historical Texts and Contemporary Readings (1989/1995). He has also edited or co-edited many volumes, including A Companion to Gender Studies (2005); A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies (2002); Between Law and Culture: Relocating Legal Studies (2002); Relocating Postcolonialism (2002); Race Critical Theories: Text and Context (2001); Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (1994); Jewish Identity (1993); and Anatomy of Racism (1990).

Earlier in his career, David Theo Goldberg produced independent films and music videos (some of which aired on MTV), and co-directed the award-winning short film on South Africa, The Island.