October 6 Thursday, 4:30pm | Oakley Center

While literature departments in North America have experienced decreasing student enrollments, budget cuts, and program closures since the end of the Cold War, the study of literature has flourished in schools of professional education. Since the 1970s, business schools, medical schools, and law schools (and their associated commercial and media spaces) have started to emerge as new sites for literary pedagogy, investing in courses, degree-granting programs, and institutes that promise to draw productive links between reading literature and professional practice in a connexionist economy. “Post-Discipline” is a sociological account of North American literary studies and contemporary literature after the institutionalization of high theory and, subsequently, the deterritorialization of literary pedagogy: its escape or departure from the literature classroom.

Merve Emre is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oxford and author of several books including The Personality Brokers (2018), which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, the Economist, NPR, CBC, and the Spectator, and informs the CNN/HBO Max documentary feature film Persona. She is starting a book called Woman: The History of an Idea and serves as a 2022 judge of the International Booker Prize.