"The academic life can be quite isolating, and something like SCT can be a profound learning experience," said School of Criticism and Theory director Amanda Anderson, M.A. '88, Ph.D. '89, professor of English literature at Johns Hopkins University. "I think it helps give one kind of a wider perspective on things." A senior SCT fellow since 2006, she has described the summer program as "an amazing, vibrant, diverse, summer theory boot camp."

SCT holds its 33rd annual session -- its 12th at Cornell -- through July 23. The intensive six-week program immerses participants in a broad range of topics in the humanities and social sciences, from poetry, art and literary history to political science and cultural movements. SCT faculty members give public lectures in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium -- as do SCT senior fellows, such as Stanley Fish of Florida International University and Cornell literary scholar Jonathan Culler, who speaks July 21.

A typical week consists of seminars and two or three public lectures, followed by receptions. A colloquium discussion is held every Thursday, usually on a featured speaker's topic at a lecture earlier that week or on a prepared paper. Participants' debates can carry as many viewpoints as there are voices in the room.

"A lot of it has to do with breaking out of the set structures of their home institutions; there's a kind of freeing effect," Anderson said. "And it is camp. They bond intensely [and] become fast friends. I think Cornell is an ideal location. In an urban center, you wouldn't get that kind of cohesion."

Of 86 SCT participants this year, 20 percent come from outside the United States; Anderson credited former director Dominick Lacapra, the Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies, "who really worked hard to promote that aspect of the program."

Not all participants are in humanities fields.

"My own research considers the interstitial spaces around areas like information science, critical theory, digital art, and science and technology studies," said Nick Knouf, a Cornell information science Ph.D. student. "SCT has given me a chance to better understand the potentials -- [and] the difficulties -- inherent within transdisciplinary research, namely questions of method, disciplinary orientation and use of texts."

Seminars and visiting faculty in 2009: "Conservatism, Religion, History," with Simon During of Johns Hopkins; "Fascism, Modernity, Politics, Aesthetics," with Geoff Eley of the University of Michigan; "On Anticolonial Metaphysics" with Leela Gandhi of the University of Chicago; and "Voice, Representation, Ideology" with Michael Steinberg and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg of Brown University. One-week mini-seminars: "Kin and Kind: Genres and Media as a World Wide Web," Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University; "Figurations of Trauma, the Sacred, and the Sublime," Dominick Lacapra, Cornell; "The Freedom of the Poet," Susan Stewart, Princeton University; and "The Critique of Pure Feeling," Brian Massumi, University of Montreal.