Born: 1956.

Education: Cambridge University, honors in French and German literature; Monash University, German literature, PhD.

Felski has taught at Murdoch University in Perth, chaired the Comparative Literature Program, University of Virginia, 2004–2008, and is currently William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at the University of Virginia and concurrently Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (2016–2021).

Publications

Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (1989), The Gender of Modernity (1995), Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (2000), Literature After Feminism (2003), and Uses of Literature (2008). The Limits of Critique (2015), an assessment of the role of the hermeneutics of suspicion as a mood and method in literary studies, has been widely reviewed. Her most recent book, Hooked: Art and Attachment, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2020. Felski is the editor of Rethinking Tragedy (2008) and co-editor of Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses (2013) and Critique and Postcritique (2017). She was influential as editor of New Literary History.

Some of her most important articles are “The Doxa of Difference,” Signs (1997); “The Invention of Everyday Life,” New Formations (1999/2000); “Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame and the Lower Middle Class,” PMLA (2000); “Being Reasonable, Telling Stories,” Feminist Theory (2000); “Modernist Studies and Cultural Studies,” Modernism/Modernity (2003); “Everyday Aesthetics,” Minnesota Review (2009); and “After Suspicion,” Profession (2009). Her articles have been published in PMLA; Signs; New Literary History; Modernism/Modernity; Cultural Critique; Theory, Culture and Society; and New Formations.

Rita Felski was interviewed by Veeser on January 9, 2015, in Vancouver.

HAV: What were the big events in the history of theory since 1966? The 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins was important, for example, bringing to the US the French theorists that later had such an impact. Were there other such moments that you can think of: conferences, confrontations?

RF: Not that many conferences. I guess in terms of conferences really the only other big conference that comes to mind would have been the ones in Illinois. The one in the early ‘80s and then the one in the early ‘90s that made that big cultural studies volume. So those were kind of pretty major interventions in the kind of intellectual arenas that I’m familiar with.