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In his seminal 1981 work The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson positioned history as the touchstone of critical dialectical thought – famously urging readers to ‘always historicise!’ – yet also cautioned against assuming that all texts were reducible to their historical context. In the half century since, challenges to the ‘historical-contextualist’ paradigm have proliferated as various movements, from postcriticism to new materialism, have advocated new hermeneutical and theoretical approaches. The problem of the historical situatedness of cultural texts, however, endures. With this group, we aim to create a space for reflection on the relationship between ‘theory’ and ‘history’ that neither presumes a necessary antagonism between the two nor reduces one to the other. How might key areas of enquiry in the humanities be enriched, we ask, by thinking history and theory together?

Each year, the reading group will select a theme that brings together a particular set of texts. The inaugural theme for the academic year 2025-26 will be ‘Relation,’ a concept that brings together philosophical and psychoanalytic concerns with ‘self and other’ and the new materialist preoccupation with the division (relation) between human and non-human. At our first meeting we will discuss selected chapters from Joan Copjec’s Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2025). The reading group’s inaugural meeting will also be used to ascertain members’ interests and determine the programme for the rest of the year

The group is open to staff and postgraduates.

Please register for the group at this link: