Charity Scribner

Faculty Fellow

Charity Scribner’s scholarship examines the cultural response to the rise and fall of left-wing militancy in Germany. She has held teaching and research positions at Columbia University, the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut-NRW, the Humboldt University, the University of Oxford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was granted the Class of 1954 Career Development Professorship. On the faculty of the English Department at LaGuardia Community College, in 2010 Scribner received an award from the National Endowment for the Arts to fund a public art collaboration with CUNY students and the visual artists Hong-An Truong and Thomas Hirschhorn. This year she is also teaching critical theory in the Department of Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. Scribner’s first book, Requiem for Communism (MIT 2003), analyzes European literature and art in the wake of communism’s collapse. She has also published articles in the New Left Review, Critical Inquiry, and Grey Room. Visit her website http://www.charityscribner.net/.

Participating Years

2011–2012

How to Fight: Transformational Politics and Culture

In response to contemporary crises of economics and politics one often sees polemics caught between reform and revolution but this division may be false from the position of radical politics and thought. As many have shown, reform has a more radical potential, one that takes social forms seriously enough to push their limits, to create new relations, to pose, as it were, non-reformist reform. Are there philosophical, literary, and aesthetic expressions of possibility that give us some purchase on rethinking how we do what we do?