Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, he has innovated sixteenth century French studies in his readings of Marguerite de Navarre, Scève, Ronsard, Rabelais, Montaigne, and the poètes rhétoriqueurs.
He has edited Fragments: Incompletion and Discontinuity;[6] France under Mitterrand;[7] Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture;[8] Le Signe et le texte;[9] Sans autre guide;[10] Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture and the Jewish Question in France;[11] Pierre Nora's Realms of Memory;[12] and Julia Kristeva's Passions of Our Time.
[13] As editor of European Perspectives, a series in social philosophy and cultural criticism from Columbia University Press, he has served as a cultural ambassador between Europe and the United States and has published authors such as Adorno, Althusser, Barthes, Baudrillard, Baumann, Bourdieu, Cixous, Deleuze, Derrida, Ginzburg, Kristeva, and Vattimo.
He serves on more than ten editorial boards in fields such as Renaissance and contemporary literatures, French society and politics, and theory and cultural studies.
Frequently consulted on both sides of the Atlantic on French culture, politics, and intellectual life, Kritzman has been interviewed by Le Figaro, Télérama, Radio France, Liberation, Le Monde, La Stampa, The International New York Times, Newsweek, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Boston Globe, and National Public Radio.
In the past, he has taught at Rutgers, Stanford, Harvard, and Michigan, and in 2010 was named Directeur d'Etude at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes-Paris.