Catastrophe and Higher Education Neoliberalism, Theory, and the Future of the Humanities

This book asks what it means to live in a higher educational world continuously tempered by catastrophe. Many of the resources for response and resistance to catastrophe have long been identified by thinkers ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James to H. G. Wells and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. Di Leo posits that hope and resistance are possible if we are willing to resist a form of pessimism that already appears to be drawing us into its arms. Catastrophe and Higher Education argues that the future of the humanities is tied to the fate of theory as a form of resistance to neoliberalism in higher education. It also offers that the fate of the academy may very well be in the hands of humanities scholars who are tasked with either rejecting theory and philosophy in times of catastrophe—or embracing it.

Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria, USA. He is founder and editor of symploke, and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange and its Winter Theory Institute. His books include Corporate Humanities in Higher Education (2013) and Higher Education under Late Capitalism (2017).