International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP)
In December 2016, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a three-and-a-half year, $1,525,000 grant to the University of California, Berkeley and $1,020,000 to Northwestern University to establish the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP). The Consortium rests on the view that critical theory is not only an important interdisciplinary field of research and teaching within the university, but it also crucially informs the university's task of promoting critical thought. The ICCTP will document, connect, and support programs and projects currently representing critical theory across the globe, especially in light of contemporary global challenges to thinking about democracy, violence, its memory, and the critical tasks of the university.The new funding will support a number of international conferences on these themes, the journal Critical Times: Interventions in Critical Theory, the new book series Critical South with Polity Press, and expansion of UC Irvine’s Critical Theory Archive. It will maintain a new website at criticaltheoryconsortium.org that already boasts an international directory of more than 300 critical theory programs, centers, institutes, projects, summer programs, fellowships and archives, located in the Global South, the United States, Europe and its peripheries, the Balkans, the Middle East, Russia and East Asia.
Northwestern’s new $1 million Mellon-funded project is among the new collaborative partnerships of the ICCTP. Through partnerships with a group of North American, Latin American, and South African institutions, a number of Inter-University Teaching Cooperations will receive funding to develop new courses on critical theory in the Global South, a new program of international faculty and graduate exchanges, and a series of inter-university doctoral workshops, conferences and translations.